What Is XPath, Anyway?
XPath is a general-purpose query language for addressing and filtering both the elements and the text of an XML document. As the name suggests, the XPath notation is basically declarative. A valid XPath expression looks like a path to a particular set of nodes or a value excerpted from the source document.
XPath works on top of a tree-based representation of the source document. The path expresses a node pattern using a notation that emphasizes the hierarchical relationship between the nodes. Although semantically speaking the closest similarity is with the SQL query language, from a syntax point of view, XPath expressions look a lot like a file system path composed of folder and file names. For example, consider the following ...
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