XPath: addressing language

• XPath: language for addressing parts of an XML document
• expression languages
• handles strings, numbers, booleans, and set of nodes
• Reused by XSLT, XPointer, XInclude, Schemas ...
• Provides a basic function library

Examples:

/p/a
//a
//a[@href = "index.html"]

doc = libxml2.htmlParseFile(url, None);
ctxt = doc.xpathNewContext()
anchors = ctxt.xpathEval("//a[@href]")
for anchor in anchors:
    href = anchor.prop("href")

Try "xmllint --shell" to test XPath expressions