XPath Basics

XPath is a query language purpose-built for navigating XML: instead of writing code to walk the document yourself, you write a path expression describing what you want, and a parser hands back the matching elements or attributes.

The document

Every example on this page queries the same small document:

<library>
  <book id="1">
    <title>Dune</title>
    <price>12.99</price>
  </book>
  <book id="2">
    <title>Foundation</title>
    <price>9.99</price>
  </book>
</library>

Absolute paths

A path starting with / begins at the document root and walks down through element names, exactly like a file path walks down through folders:

/library/book/title

<title>Dune</title>
<title>Foundation</title>

Selecting an attribute

An @ prefix selects an attribute instead of a child element:

/library/book/@id

id="1"
id="2"

Searching anywhere with //

A double slash matches an element anywhere in the document, regardless of how deeply it's nested — useful when you don't want to (or can't) spell out the full path:

//price

<price>12.99</price>
<price>9.99</price>

Filtering with a predicate

Square brackets add a condition, filtering which matches actually get returned — either by position or by a value check:

/library/book[1]/title

<title>Dune</title>

/library/book[@id='2']/title

<title>Foundation</title>