Expressions, Paths, and Steps

Chapter 18 - Ten Most Confusing Things About XSLT
XSLT For Dummies
by Richard Wagner
Hungry Minds 2002

  

XPath is used to create expressions, but some types of expressions are more important to XSLT than others. In a generic sense, an expression is a string of XPath instructions that the XSLT processor evaluates to produce a result, which may be a number, string, Boolean value, or a node set. However, XSLT is most interested in a particular kind of expression called a location path , which is a set of instructions that specify what nodes to bring back to the XSLT stylesheet. The location path then consists of a series of smaller parts called location steps. A location step consists of an axis, a node test, and an optional predicate and takes the following form: axis::nodetest[predicate] .

Check out Chapter 5 for more details on XPath expressions.

    

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