XPath Examples (JNNC Technologies)

The XML Example Document

We will use the following XML document in the examples below.

"books.xml":

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<bookstore>

<book category="cooking">
  <title lang="en">Everyday Italian</title>
  <author>Giada De Laurentiis</author>
  <year>2005</year>
  <price>30.00</price>
</book>

<book category="children">
  <title lang="en">Harry Potter</title>
  <author>J K. Rowling</author>
  <year>2005</year>
  <price>29.99</price>
</book>

<book category="web">
  <title lang="en">XQuery Kick Start</title>
  <author>James McGovern</author>
  <author>Per Bothner</author>
  <author>Kurt Cagle</author>
  <author>James Linn</author>
  <author>Vaidyanathan Nagarajan</author>
  <year>2003</year>
  <price>49.99</price>
</book>

<book category="web">
  <title lang="en">Learning XML</title>
  <author>Erik T. Ray</author>
  <year>2003</year>
  <price>39.95</price>
</book>

</bookstore>

Loading the XML Document

Using an XMLHttpRequest object to load XML documents is supported in all modern browsers.

var xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();

Code for older browsers (IE5 and IE6) can be found in the AJAX tutorial.

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Selecting Nodes

Unfortunately, there are different ways of dealing with XPath in different browsers.

Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, and Safari use the evaluate() method to select nodes:

xmlDoc.evaluate(xpath, xmlDoc, null, XPathResult.ANY_TYPE,null);

Internet Explorer uses the selectNodes() method to select node:

xmlDoc.selectNodes(xpath);

In our examples we have included code that should work with most major browsers.

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Select all the titles

The following example selects all the title nodes:

Example

/bookstore/book/title

Try it Yourself »

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Select the title of the first book

The following example selects the title of the first book node under the bookstore element:

Example

/bookstore/book[1]/title

Try it Yourself »

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Select all the prices

The following example selects the text from all the price nodes:

Example

/bookstore/book/price[text()]

Try it Yourself »

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Select price nodes with price>35

The following example selects all the price nodes with a price higher than 35:

Example

/bookstore/book[price>35]/price

Try it Yourself »

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Select title nodes with price>35

The following example selects all the title nodes with a price higher than 35:

Example

/bookstore/book[price>35]/title