November 2003
Intermediate to advanced
476 pages
14h 38m
English
Content preview from .NET & XMLBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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What Is XPath?
XPath is a specification that allows you to address individual parts of an XML document, originally intended for use in the XSLT transformation language and the XPointer syntax for XML fragment identifiers. However, XPath is quite useful on its own, and is available for standalone use in .NET.
Tip
Although XSLT is covered in Chapter 7, XPointer is not implemented in the .NET Framework. Thus, XPointer falls outside of the range of this book. For more information on XPath, XPointer, and their relationship, see John Simpson’s XPath & XPointer (O’Reilly).
XPath 1.0 became a formal
recommendation of the W3C in November, 1999, although XPath 2.0 is
currently a working draft, still evolving as of this writing. The
official XPath recommendation is located on the web at http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath.
The essence of XPath is that you can select certain nodes from within an XML document through a simple XPath expression. In addition, XPath allows you to do some simple string, numeric, and Boolean data transformation on selected nodes. XPath expressions take the form of strings with a certain well-known syntax. This syntax is not explicitly XML itself; it is similar to filesystem pathnames and URLs, and this is where XPath gets its name.
In addition to addressing nodes by name, XPath syntax enables pattern matching, so that you can select individual nodes by their attribute or content values.
In this section, I’ll discuss the structure and syntax of XPath expressions, and some ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.