XPath

XPath (XML Path Language) is a language for selecting nodes from an XML document. In addition, XPath may be used to compute values (strings, numbers, or boolean values) from the content of an XML document. The current version of the language is XPath 2.0, but version 1.0 is still more widely used. The XPath language is based on a tree representation of the XML document, and provides the ability to navigate around the tree, selecting nodes by a va... more

XPath (XML Path Language) is a language for selecting nodes from an XML document. In addition, XPath may be used to compute values (strings, numbers, or boolean values) from the content of an XML document. The current version of the language is XPath 2.0, but version 1.0 is still more widely used. The XPath language is based on a tree representation of the XML document, and provides the ability to navigate around the tree, selecting nodes by a variety of criteria. In popular use (though not in the official specification), an XPath expression is often referred to simply as an XPath. Originally motivated by a desire to provide a common syntax and behavior model between XPointer and XSLT, subsets of the XPath query language are used in other W3C specifications such as XML Schema and XForms. The most important kind of expression in XPath is a location path. A location path consists of a sequence of location steps. Each location step has three components: An XPath expression is evaluated... less