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XQuery
book

XQuery

by Priscilla Walmsley
March 2007
Intermediate to advanced
512 pages
21h 15m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from XQuery

Chapter 4. Navigating Input Documents Using Paths

Path expressions are used to navigate 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

Example

Explanation

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 the catalog element

doc("catalog.xml")/catalog/*/number

All number elements that are grandchildren of the catalog element

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

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596006349Errata