XPath Expressions in Multiple Language Environments

Text Attributes

Most table elements contain a text attribute that contains the information as it would appear in a pivot table in the current output language. For example, the column in a frequency table that contains counts is labeled Frequency in English but Frecuencia in Spanish.

For XPath expressions that need to work in a multiple language environment, it is recommended to use the text_eng attribute, whose value is the English value of the text attribute regardless of the output language. For example, in the case of Frequency discussed above the associated text_eng attribute would always have the value 'Frequency', so your XPath expression would contain @text_eng='Frequency' instead of @text='Frequency'. The OATTRS subcommand of the SET command specifies whether text_eng attributes are included in OXML output. See the topic XVERSION and OATTRS Subcommands for more information.

Positional Arguments

For many table types you can use positional arguments that are not affected by output language. For example, in a frequency table the column that contains counts is always the first column, so a positional argument of category[1] at the appropriate level of the tree structure should always select information in the column that contains counts.

In some table types, however, the elements in the table and order of elements in the table can vary. For example, the order of statistics in the columns or rows of table subtype "Report" generated by the MEANS command is determined by the specified order of the statistics on the CELLS subcommand. In fact, two tables of this type may not even display the same statistics at all. So category[1] might select the category that contains mean values in one table, median values in another table, and nothing at all in another table.