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XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition
book

XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

by Elliotte Rusty Harold, W. Scott Means
September 2004
Intermediate to advanced
712 pages
24h 45m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

The Root Location Path

The simplest location path is the one that selects the root node of the document. This is simply the forward slash /. (You’ll notice that a lot of XPath syntax is deliberately similar to the syntax used by the Unix shell. Here / is the root node of a Unix filesystem, and / is the root node of an XML document.) For example, this XSLT template rule uses the XPath pattern / to match the entire input document tree and wrap it in an html element:

<xsl:template match="/">
  <html><xsl:apply-templates/></html>
</xsl:template>

/ is an absolute location path because no matter what the context node is—that is, no matter where the processor was in the input document when this template rule was applied—it always means the same thing: the root node of the document. It is relative to which document you’re processing, but not to anything within that document.

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596007647Errata Page