XML.HTMLTeacher.Com XPath Overview

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Table of Contents

1. Overview
2. Match Patterns
3. Path Expressions
4. Tutorial/Lab

XPath specifies the locations of document structures and then processes the information using XSLT.

A node is one piece of the XML document. There are 7 XPath node types: root, element, attribute, namespace, processing instruction, text and comment.

XPath and its expressions allow you to address parts of an XML document to locate elements, attributes, and other XML document nodes. This addressing mechanism is called the location path.

A location path describes the address of one node with respect to another.

For example:

<EmployeeListing>
<Employee>
<Employee1>
<FullName>
<FirstName></FirstName>
<LastName></LastName>
</FullName>
</Employee1>
</Employee>
</EmployeeListing>

The XPath for getting to the nested <FullName> element would be:

EmployeeListing/Employee/Employee1/FullName

XSLT processors access from the Root node. Therefore, all elements UP TO a specified element that is to be processed are accessed until the processor has found what it needed. Then it begins processing once again from the Root node.

A Root node is a ParentElement. ChildElements can also be ParentElements is they contain ChildElements.

A processor will display all element content unless otherwise stated by using special elements, expressions and as defined by XSLT.

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