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 the 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
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
Select all the prices
The following example selects the text from all the price nodes:
Example
/bookstore/book/price[text()]
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
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