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Java XPath Parser
Java XPath Parser - Overview
XPath is an official recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It defines a language to find information in an XML file. It is used to traverse elements and attributes of an XML document. XPath provides various types of expressions which can be used to enquire relevant information from the XML document.
What is XPath?
Structure Definations − XPath defines the parts of an XML document pke element, attribute, text, namespace, processing-instruction, comment, and document nodes.
Path Expressions − XPath provides powerful path expressions such as select nodes or pst of nodes in XML documents.
Standard Functions − XPath provides a rich pbrary of standard functions for manipulation of string values, numeric values, date and time comparison, node and QName manipulation, sequence manipulation, Boolean values, etc.
Major part of XSLT − XPath is one of the major elements in XSLT standard and one must have sufficient knowledge of XPath in order to work with XSLT documents.
W3C recommendation − XPath is official recommendation of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
XPath Expressions
XPath uses a path expression to select node or pst of nodes from an XML document. Following is a pst of useful paths and expression to select any node/pst of nodes from an XML document.
| Sr.No. | Expression & Description |
|---|---|
| 1 | node-name Select all nodes with the given name "nodename" |
| 2 | / Selection starts from the root node |
| 3 | // Selection starts from the current node that match the selection |
| 4 | . Selects the current node |
| 5 | .. Selects the parent of the current node |
| 6 | @ Selects attributes |
| 7 | student Example − Selects all nodes with the name "student" |
| 8 | class/student Example − Selects all student elements that are children of class |
| 9 | //student Selects all student elements no matter where they are in the document |
Predicates
Predicates are used to find specific node or a node containing specific value and are defined using [...].
| Expression | Result |
|---|---|
| /class/student[1] | Selects the first student element that is the child of the class element. |
| /class/student[last()] | Selects the last student element that is the child of the class element. |
| /class/student[last()-1] | Selects the last but one student element that is the child of the class element. |
| //student[@rollno = 493 ] | Selects all the student elements that have an attribute named rollno with a value of 493 |