What is XPath?

If you are working with XML documents, XPath provides a standard way to locate elements and attributes.

XPath treats an XML document as a tree of nodes and allows applications to navigate that tree using simple path expressions.

Consider the following XML document:

<Customers>
    <Customer>
        <Name>John Doe</Name>
    </Customer>
</Customers>

The following XPath expression selects the Name element:

/Customers/Customer/Name

You can also search for elements regardless of their location with a double slash at the front:

//Name

Attributes can be selected using the @ character:

//Customer[@Id='42']

XPath is commonly used together with XML parsers, XSL Transformations (XSLT), and XML-based web technologies.

Learning XPath makes it much easier to retrieve information from structured XML documents without writing custom parsing code.