Sams Teach Yourself XML in 10 Minutes

Accessing Attributes

Selecting attributes is another important use of XPath. You learned earlier that you can use the @ character as an abbreviation for attribute::. You can use the following short XML document to illustrate how to select attributes.

<book edition="1st" language="English"> 
<introduction>Some introduction text</introduction> 
<chapter number="1"> 
Some Chapter 1 text. 
</chapter> 
<chapter number="2"> 
Some Chapter 2 text. 
</chapter> 
<chapter > 
Some Chapter 3 text. 
</chapter> 
<appendix designation="A"> 
Appendix A's content 
</appendix> 
</book> 

If you want to select the edition attribute on the book element, you can write this:

/book/@edition 

It might help you understand this to look at the unabbreviated form:

 /child::book/attribute::edition ...