Special Edition Using XML, Second Edition

Navigating the Document Via XPath in Java

Another important method for navigating XML documents is via XPath. XPath is a non-XML based specification for addressing arbitrary locations in XML Documents. The XPath syntax is described in detail in Chapter 11, “Locating Components in XML Documents with XPath.” A basic usage of XPath with Java is provided in this section.

Unfortunately, a standard interface for XPath is not yet part of the standard Java API for XML provided by Sun. However, a robust implementation available for XPath works seamlessly with implementations of the Java API for XML like Xerces and Xalan. That XPath implementation is called Jaxen (available at http://jaxen.org).

Jaxen is a native Java implementation of the full XPath Specification ...