What is XPath

XPath is a language for addressing specific parts of an XML document. XPath, like the Document Object Model (DOM), models an XML document as a tree of nodes. An XPath expression is a mechanism for navigating through and selecting nodes from the XML document. An XPath expression is, in a way, analogous to an SQL query used to select records from a database.

There are different types of nodes, including element nodes, attribute nodes and text nodes. XPath defines a way to compute a string-value for each type of node.

XPath defines a library of standard functions for working with strings, numbers and boolean expressions.

child::* - Selects all children of the root node.
.//name - Selects all elements having the name "name", descendants of the current node.
/catalog/cd[price>10.80] - Selects all the cd elements that have a price element with a value larger than 10.80.

To find out more about XPath, go to http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath.