Working with XPath Expressions
XPath is a language for addressing specific parts of an XML document. XPath, such as the Document Object Model (DOM), models an XML document as a tree of nodes. An XPath expression is a mechanism for navigating through and selecting nodes from the XML document. An XPath expression is, in a way, analogous to an SQL query used to select records from a database.
There are various types of nodes, including element nodes, attribute nodes, and text nodes. XPath defines a way to compute a string-value for each type of node.
XPath defines a library of standard functions for working with strings, numbers and boolean expressions.
child::*- Selects all children of the root node..//name- Selects all elements having the name "name", descendants of the current node./catalog/cd[price>10.80]- Selects all thecdelements that have a price element with a value larger than 10.80.
To find out more about XPath, go to http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath.