XPath 1.0 (XSL Patterns): Interactive Expression Builder

The problem: You want to take advantage of the power and simplicity that XML tools can offer, but you face a site full of aging HTML documents. The solution: Convert your documents to XHTML and put Perl and XML::XPath to work.

Visual XPath is a graphical way of generating XPath query results. It can also be used to generate XPath queries dynamically by select XML nodes shown in the form of Tree. You can also generate queries for individual attributes.

Examining working stylesheets can help us understand how we use XSLT and XPath to perform transformations. This article first dissects some example stylesheets before introducing basic terminology and design principles.

XPath and XPointer allow XML developers and document authors to find and manipulate specific needles of content in an XML document's haystack. From mindful use of predicates, to processor efficiency, to exploring both the standards themselves and extensions to them, this article offers ten tips -- techniques and gotchas -- to bear in mind as you use XPath and XPointer in your own work.

XPE is now hosted on SourceForge. Please go to the Project Download Page to download, in order to bump up my activity rating :-). (The links below remain active, in case SourceForge is unavailable.)

This morning, I finally decided to install libxml2 and see what all the fuss was about, in particular with respect to XPath. What followed is best described as an enlightening experience.

XPath can be thought of as a query language like SQL. However, rather than extracting information from a database, it extracts information from an XML document. An example should help make this more concrete. Consider the simple weather report document in Example 16.1.

Since XSLT and XPointer rely on XPath, developers are asking whether an XPath API should be created."

XML Path Language (XPath) is the result of an effort to provide a common syntax and semantics for functionality shared between XSL Transformations and XPointer. The primary purpose of XPath is to address parts of an XML document.

XPath interface for XT provides for DOM query API facifities on top of XT. It is implemented in Java language and complies with W3C's XPath Proposed Recommendation as is currently implemented in XT.

Abbreviates XPath 1.0 Verbose Expressions

4XPath is an XML path processing library based on the W3C's specification for the XPath language for addressing parts of an XML document. 4XPath supports the full XPath Recommendation except for the 'lang' core function." - Now released as a component of 4suite.

This tool is meant as a learning tool for XPath.

The XPath function library contains a set of core functions for converting and translating data.

XPath is a language for addressing parts of an XML document, used most commonly by XSLT. There are various APIs for processing XPath. For the purposes of this article I will use the open source Jaxen API. Jaxen is a Java XPath engine that supports many XML parsing APIs, such as SAX, DOM4J, and DOM. It also supports namespaces, variables, and functions.

Writing XPath expressions and using variables.

In this month's Transforming XML column Bob DuCharme explains some of the new and improved string handling functions -- for concatenation, search, and replace -- in XSLT/XPath 2.0.