What Is XPath?

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What Is a Location Path?

In XSL parlance, a location path consists of the 'directions' to a node. A location path can consist of three components: an axis, a node test, and an optional predicate. In colloquial terms, think of an axis as the 'direction' of travel; e.g., 'downward' in the direction of the child nodes. A node test is a condition for testing whether a candidate node belongs to a set; e.g., is the candidate node a child node of the context node? Finally, the predicate might extract the value of an element node or an attribute; e.g., select the contents of the <name> node of a chapter node. Again, keep in mind that these are very informal descriptions that are intended to facilitate your understanding of a location path.

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