XPath Basics
XPath expressions navigate and retrieve XML content similar to traversing a file system’s directory structure, except that XPath works on an XML document tree (also called XML DOM tree).
In XPath, the root node of an XML document is defined as a slash (/). Then, a location path, which is another slash (/) along with the element’s name, steps down the XML DOM tree and selects the specified XML element. For example, the XPath expression /contact returns the <contact> element. The /contact/first_name returns the <first_name> element, which is a child element of <contact>.
The most important type of XPath expressions is the location path, which consists of a sequence of location steps. Each step has three components: an axis, a node ...
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