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XQuery, 2nd Edition
book

XQuery, 2nd Edition

by Priscilla Walmsley
December 2015
Intermediate to advanced
762 pages
19h 13m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from XQuery, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4. Navigating XML by Using Paths

Path expressions are used to navigate XML input documents to select elements and attributes of interest. This chapter explains how to use path expressions to select elements and attributes from an input document and apply predicates to filter those results. It also covers the different methods of accessing input documents.

Path Expressions

A path expression is made up of one or more steps that are separated by a slash (/) or double slashes (//). For example, the path:

doc("catalog.xml")/catalog/product

selects all the product children of the catalog element in the catalog.xml document. Table 4-1 shows some other simple path expressions.

Table 4-1. Simple path expressions
ExampleReturn value
doc("catalog.xml")/catalog The catalog element that is the outermost element of the document
doc("catalog.xml")//product All product elements anywhere in the document
doc("catalog.xml")//product/@dept All dept attributes of product elements in the document
doc("catalog.xml")/catalog/* All child elements of catalog
doc("catalog.xml")/catalog/*/number All number elements that are grandchildren of catalog

Path expressions return nodes in document order. This means that the examples in Table 4-1 return the product elements in the same order that they appear in the catalog.xml document. More information on document order and on sorting results differently can be found in Chapter 7.

Path Expressions and Context

A path expression is always evaluated relative to a particular ...

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