Extending MFC Applications with the .NET Framework

Appendix B. XPath Overview and Syntax

Intended Audience This appendix is not meant as a complete tutorial on XPath. Rather it is intended as a complement to Chapter 5 for those people who've never used the querying capabilities of the XPath language. It serves as a collection of sample XPath expressions that can be tested with some of Chapter 5's code snippets and demo applications. While not a prerequisite for using XML, understanding XPath will enable you to perform much richer and more complex queries against your data.

Before getting into the XPath syntax and examples, let's first talk about what it is. At its simplest, XPath is a W3C standardized syntax for accessing parts of an XML document and is typically used in building complex queries ...