What is XPath?
XPath is a language for addressing an XML document's elements and attributes. As an example, say you receive an XML document that contains the details of a shipment and you want to retrieve the element/attribute values from the XML document. You don't just want to list the values of all the nodes, but also want to output the values of specific elements or attributes. In such a case, you would use XPath to retrieve the values of those elements and attributes. XPath constructs a hierarchical structure of an XML document, a tree of nodes, which is the XPath data model. The XPath data model consists of seven node types. The different types of nodes in the XPath data model are discussed in the following table:
|
Node Type |
Description |
|---|---|
|
Root Node |
The root node is the root of the DOM tree. The document element (the root element) is a child of the root node. The root node also has the processing instructions and comments as child nodes. |
|
Element Node |
This represents an element... |
