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XPath Tutorial

XPath Introduction XPath Nodes XPath Syntax XPath Axes XPath Operators XPath Examples

XSLT Tutorial

XSLT Introduction XSL Languages XSLT Transform XSLT <template> XSLT <value-of> XSLT <for-each> XSLT <sort> XSLT <if> XSLT <choose> XSLT Apply XSLT on the Client XSLT on the Server XSLT Edit XML XSLT Examples

XQuery Tutorial

XQuery Introduction XQuery Example XQuery FLWOR XQuery HTML XQuery Terms XQuery Syntax XQuery Add XQuery Select XQuery Functions

XML DTD

DTD Introduction DTD Building Blocks DTD Elements DTD Attributes DTD Elements vs Attr DTD Entities DTD Examples

XSD Schema

XSD Introduction XSD How To XSD <schema> XSD Elements XSD Attributes XSD Restrictions XSD Complex Elements XSD Empty XSD Elements-only XSD Text-only XSD Mixed XSD Indicators XSD <any> XSD <anyAttribute> XSD Substitution XSD Example

XSD Data Types

XSD String XSD Date/Time XSD Numeric XSD Misc XSD Reference

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XML Services XML WSDL XML SOAP XML RDF XML RSS

References

DOM Node Types DOM Node DOM NodeList DOM NamedNodeMap DOM Document DOM Element DOM Attribute DOM Text DOM CDATA DOM Comment DOM XMLHttpRequest DOM Parser XSLT Elements XSLT/XPath Functions

XPath Examples


Let's try to learn some basic XPath syntax by looking at some examples.


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>

View the "books.xml" file in your browser.



Loading the XML Document

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

var xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();

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.


Select all the titles

The following example selects all the title nodes:

Example

/bookstore/book/title
Try it Yourself »

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 »

Select all the prices

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

Example

/bookstore/book/price[text()]
Try it Yourself »

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 »

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
Try it Yourself »