XPath wildcards on node name

This is the correct XPath 1.0 expression which selects an element with the last 5 character of name equal to "_cost" in any namespace.

/data/stats/*[substring(name(), string-length(name()) - 4) = '_cost']

With XPath 1.0 you can use /data/stats/*[substring-after(name(), '_cost') = ''] pattern. That checks if the element's name ends with the _cost suffix.

In XPath 2.0 there is fn:ends-with(str, str) and your corresponding expression will be *[ends-with(name(), '_cost')].

You could also use contains

e.g

/data/stats[contains(.,'_cost')] 

The above did not work for me. I had to "slightly" modify that as follows:

/data/stats/*[contains(name(),'_cost')]