Question

For example I have the following XML file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<bookstore>
  <book>
    <title lang="eng">Harry Potter</title>
    <price>29.99</price>
  </book>
  <book>
    <title lang="eng">Learning XML</title>
    <price>39.95</price>
  </book>
</bookstore>

I want to query book and return the following text:

<title lang="eng">Harry Potter</title>
<price>29.99</price>

Is it possible in XPath? If yes, how do I go about doing that?

Thank you.

Answer 1

An XPath expression can select the nodes you want, but the serialization is up to the programming language (such as XSLT, C#, PHP, Java) that hosts XPath and its API (such as DOM objects and methods).

This XPath expression:

/*/book[1]/*

selects exactly the wanted nodes:

<title lang="eng">Harry Potter</title>
<price>29.99</price>

The XPath expression above, in plain English, means:

Select all elements that are children of the first (in document order) book element that is a child of the top element (regardless what is its name) of the XML document.