title: XPath evaluation tool for PMD/AST rules that shows you what your XPath "grabbed", instead of evaluating for true/false?
body: <p>We are struggling a bit with PMD and its PMD Rule Designer. It seems to only evaluate XPath statements and work with boolean values. </p>
  
  <p>Sometimes, it would really help to be able to see what (a part of) our XPath grabbed as a String. For example, the other day, we were struggling, because we were trying to compare the first character of the argument passed into an annotation to a set of characters. After hours of trial and error, we realized that we had grabbed the opening quotation mark instead of the first letter. Being able to see what we actually grab would have saved us hours of trial and error...</p>
  
  <p>So, is there a GUI/tool that lets us run XPath on Java code and returns what we selected, instead of just evaluating an expression for true or false?</p>