XPath Nodes (JNNC Technologies)


XPath Terminology

Nodes

In XPath, there are seven kinds of nodes: element, attribute, text, namespace, processing-instruction, comment, and document nodes.
XML documents are treated as trees of nodes. The topmost element of the tree is called the root element.
Look at the following XML document:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<bookstore>
  <book>
    <title lang="en">Harry Potter</title>
    <author>J K. Rowling</author>
    <year>2005</year>
    <price>29.99</price>
  </book>
</bookstore>
Example of nodes in the XML document above:
<bookstore> (root element node)

<author>J K. Rowling</author> (element node)

lang="en" (attribute node)

Atomic values

Atomic values are nodes with no children or parent.
Example of atomic values:
J K. Rowling

"en"

Items

Items are atomic values or nodes.

Relationship of Nodes

Parent

Each element and attribute has one parent.
In the following example; the book element is the parent of the title, author, year, and price:
<book>
  <title>Harry Potter</title>
  <author>J K. Rowling</author>
  <year>2005</year>
  <price>29.99</price>
</book>

Children

Element nodes may have zero, one or more children.
In the following example; the title, author, year, and price elements are all children of the book element:
<book>
  <title>Harry Potter</title>
  <author>J K. Rowling</author>
  <year>2005</year>
  <price>29.99</price>
</book>

Siblings

Nodes that have the same parent.
In the following example; the title, author, year, and price elements are all siblings:
<book>
  <title>Harry Potter</title>
  <author>J K. Rowling</author>
  <year>2005</year>
  <price>29.99</price>
</book>

Ancestors

A node's parent, parent's parent, etc.
In the following example; the ancestors of the title element are the book element and the bookstore element:
<bookstore>

<book>
  <title>Harry Potter</title>
  <author>J K. Rowling</author>
  <year>2005</year>
  <price>29.99</price>
</book>

</bookstore>

Descendants

A node's children, children's children, etc.
In the following example; descendants of the bookstore element are the book, title, author, year, and price elements:
<bookstore>

<book>
  <title>Harry Potter</title>
  <author>J K. Rowling</author>
  <year>2005</year>
  <price>29.99</price>
</book>

</bookstore>

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