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XPath 1.0

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Xpath expression applied to an XML file

XPath (XML Path Language) is a language for selecting nodes from an XML document. In addition, XPath may be used to compute values (strings, numbers, or boolean values) from the content of an XML document. The current version of the language is XPath 2.0, but because version 1.0 is still the more widely-used version, this article describes XPath 1.0.

The XPath language is based on a tree representation of the XML document, and provides the ability to navigate around the tree, selecting nodes by a variety of criteria. In popular use (though not in the official specification), an XPath expression is often referred to simply as an XPath.

Originally motivated by a desire to provide a common syntax and behavior model between XPointer and XSLT, subsets of the XPath query language are used in other W3C specifications such as XML Schema and XForms.

Syntax and Semantics

The most important kind of expression in XPath is a location path. A location path consists of a sequence of location steps. Each location step has three components:

  • an axis
  • a node test
  • and a predicate.

An XPath expression is evaluated with respect to a context node. An Axis Specifier such as 'child' or 'descendant' specifies the direction to navigate from the context node. The node test and the predicate are used to filter the nodes specified by the axis specifier: For example the node test 'A' requires that all nodes navigated to must have label 'A'. A predicate can be used to specify that the selected nodes have certain properties, which are specified by XPath expressions themselves.

Two notations are defined; the first, known as abbreviated syntax, is more compact and allows XPaths to be written and read easily using intuitive and, in many cases, familiar characters and constructs. The full syntax is more verbose, but allows for more options to be specified, and is more descriptive if read carefully.

Abbreviated syntax

The compact notation allows many defaults and abbreviations for common cases. Given source XML containing at least 

<A>
  <B>
   <C/>
  </B>
</A>

the simplest XPath takes a form such as

  • /A/B/C

which selects C elements that are children of B elements that are children of the A element that forms the outermost element of the XML document. XPath syntax is designed to mimic URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) syntax and file path syntax.

More complex expressions can be constructed by specifying an axis other than the default 'child' axis, a node test other than a simple name, or predicates, which can be written in square brackets after any step. For example, the expression

  • A//B/*[1]

selects the first element ('[1]'), whatever its name ('*'), that is a child ('/') of a B element that itself is a child or other, deeper descendant ('//') of an A element that is a child of the current context node (the expression does not begin with a '/'). If there are several suitable B elements in the document, this actually returns a set of all their first children.

Expanded syntax

In the full, unabbreviated syntax, the two examples above would be written

  • /child::A/child::B/child::C
  • child::A/descendant-or-self::node()/child::B/child::*[position()=1]

Here, in each step of the XPath, the axis (e.g. child or descendant-or-self) is explicitly specified, followed by :: and then the node test, such as A or node() in the examples above

Axis specifiers

The Axis Specifier indicates navigation direction within the tree representation of the XML document. The axes available are:

Full Syntax Abbreviated Syntax Notes
ancestor
ancestor-or-self
attribute @ @abc is short for attribute::abc
child xyz is short for child::xyz
descendant
descendant-or-self // // is short for /descendant-or-self::node()/
following
following-sibling
namespace
parent .. .. is short for parent::node()
preceding
preceding-sibling
self . . is short for self::node()

As an example of using the attribute axis in abbreviated syntax, //a/@href selects the attribute called href in a elements anywhere in the document tree. The expression . (an abbreviation for self::node()) is most commonly used within a predicate to refer to the currently selected node. For example, h3[.='See also'] selects an element called h3 in the current context, whose text content is See also.

Node tests

Node tests may consist of specific node names or more general expressions. In the case of an XML document in which the namespace prefix gs has been defined, //gs:enquiry will find all the enquiry elements in that namespace, and //gs:* will find all elements, regardless of local name, in that namespace.

Other node test formats are:

comment()
finds an XML comment node, e.g. <!-- Comment -->
text()
finds a node of type text, e.g. the hello in <k>hello<m> all</m></k>
processing-instruction()
finds XML processing instructions such as <?php echo $a; ?>. In this case, processing-instruction('php') would match.
node()
finds any node at all.

Predicates

Expressions of any complexity can be specified in square brackets, that must be satisfied before the preceding node will be matched by an XPath. For example //a[@href='help.php'], which will match an a element with an href attribute whose value is help.php.

There is no limit to the number of predicates in a step, and they need not be confined to the last step in an XPath. They can also be nested to any depth. Paths specified in predicates begin at the context of the current step (i.e. that of the immediately preceding node test) and do not alter that context. All predicates must be satisfied for a match to occur.

When //a[/html/@lang='en'][@href='help.php'][1]/@target is applied to a XHTML document, it selects the value of the target attribute of the first a element that has its href attribute set to help.php, provided the document's html top-level element also has a lang attribute set to en. The reference to an attribute of the top-level element in the first predicate affects neither the context of other predicates nor that of the location step itself.

Predicate order is significant, however. Each predicate 'filters' a location step's selected node-set in turn. //a[1][/html/@lang='en'][@href='help.php']/@target will find a match only if the first a element in a @lang='en' document also meets @href='help.php'

The above uses //a[1] incorrectly where it should use (//a)[1]. See talk page.

Functions and operators

XPath 1.0 defines four data types: node-sets (sets of nodes with no intrinsic order), strings, numbers and booleans.

The available operators are:

  • The "/", "//" and "[...]" operators, used in path expressions, as described above.
  • A union operator, "|", which forms the union of two node-sets.
  • Boolean operators "and" and "or", and a function "not()"
  • Arithmetic operators "+", "-", "*", "div" (divide), and "mod"
  • Comparison operators "=", "!=", "<", ">", "<=", ">="

The function library includes:

  • Functions to manipulate strings: concat(), substring(), contains(), substring-before(), substring-after(), translate(), normalize-space(), string-length()
  • Functions to manipulate numbers: sum(), round(), floor(), ceiling()
  • Functions to get properties of nodes: name(), local-name(), namespace-uri()
  • Functions to get information about the processing context: position(), last()
  • Type conversion functions: string(), number(), boolean()

Some of the more commonly useful functions are detailed below. For a complete description, see the W3C Recommendation document

Node set functions

position()
returns a number representing the position of this node in the sequence of nodes currently being processed (for example, the nodes selected by an xsl:for-each instruction in XSLT).
count(node-set)
returns the number of nodes in the node-set supplied as its argument.

String functions

string(object?)
converts any of the four XPath data types into a string according to built-in rules. If the value of the argument is a node-set, the function returns the string-value of the first node in document order, ignoring any further nodes.
concat(string, string, string*)
concatenates two or more strings
contains(s1, s2)
returns true if s1 contains s2
normalize-space(string?)
all leading and trailing whitespace is removed and any sequences of whitespace characters are replaced by a single space. This is very useful when the original XML may have been prettyprint formatted, which could make further string processing unreliable.

Boolean functions

not(boolean)
negates any boolean expression.
true()
evaluates to true.
false()
evaluates to false.

Number functions

sum(node-set)
converts the string values of all the nodes found by the XPath argument into numbers, according to the built-in casting rules, then returns the sum of these numbers.

Usage examples

Expressions can be created inside predicates using the operators: =, !=, <=, <, >= and >. Boolean expressions may be combined with brackets () and the boolean operators and and or as well as the not() function described above. Numeric calculations can use *, +, -, div and mod. Strings can consist of any Unicode characters.

//item[@price > 2*@discount] selects items whose price attribute is greater than twice the numeric value of their discount attribute.

Entire node-sets can be combined ('unioned') using the pipe character |. Node sets that meet one or more of several conditions can be found by combining the conditions inside a predicate with 'or'.

v[x or y] | w[z] will return a single node-set consisting of all the v elements that have x or y child-elements, as well as all the w elements that have z child-elements, that were found in the current context.


Examples

Given a sample XML document 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<wikimedia>
  <projects>
    <project name="Wikipedia" launch="2001-01-05">
      <editions>
        <edition language="English">en.wikipedia.org</edition>
        <edition language="German">de.wikipedia.org</edition>
        <edition language="French">fr.wikipedia.org</edition>
        <edition language="Polish">pl.wikipedia.org</edition>
        <edition language="Spanish">es.wikipedia.org</edition>
      </editions>
    </project>
    <project name="Wiktionary" launch="2002-12-12">
      <editions>
        <edition language="English">en.wiktionary.org</edition>
        <edition language="French">fr.wiktionary.org</edition>
        <edition language="Vietnamese">vi.wiktionary.org</edition>
        <edition language="Turkish">tr.wiktionary.org</edition>
        <edition language="Spanish">es.wiktionary.org</edition>
      </editions>
    </project>
  </projects>
</wikimedia>

The XPath expression 

/wikimedia/projects/project/@name

Selects name attributes for all projects, and 

/wikimedia//editions

Selects all editions of all projects, and 

/wikimedia/projects/project/editions/edition[@language="English"]/text()

Selects addresses of all English Wikimedia projects (text of all edition elements where language attribute is equal to English), and the following 

/wikimedia/projects/project[@name="Wikipedia"]/editions/edition/text()

Selects addresses of all Wikipedias (text of all edition elements that exist under project element with a name attribute of Wikipedia)

Implementations

Command Line Tools
ActionScript
C/C++
Delphi
  • TurboPower XML Partner (now legally released free-of-charge on SourceForge by its original, now-defunct developer)
Implementations for Database Engines
Java
  • Jaxen is an Open Source XPath implementation supporting (embedded by) multiple XML parsers (XOM, Dom4J, JDom).
  • Apache Xalan-Java supports XPath 1.0 (as well as XSLT 1.0)
  • Saxon supports XPath 1.0 and XPath 2.0 (as well as XSLT 1.0, XSLT 2.0, and XQuery 1.0)
  • VTD-XML [2]
  • Sedna XML Database Both XML:DB and proprietary.

The Java package javax.xml.xpath has been part of Java standard edition since Java 5. Technically this is an XPath API rather than an XPath implementation, and it allows the programmer the ability to select a specific implementation that conforms to the interface.

JavaScript
.NET Framework
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
ActionScript
Scheme
SQL
  • MySQL supports a subset of Xpath from version 5.1.5 onwards

Use of XPath in Schema Languages

XPath is increasingly used to express constraints in schema languages for XML.

  • The (now ISO standard) schema language Schematron pioneered the approach.
  • A streaming subset of XPath is used in W3C XML Schema for expressing uniqueness and key constraints.
  • XForms uses XPath to bind types to values.
  • The approach has even found use in non-XML applications, such as the constraint language for Java called PMD: the Java is converted to a DOM-like parse tree, then XPaths rules are defined over the tree.

See also

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