Child Element Location Steps
The second simplest location path is a single element
name. This path selects all child elements of the context node with
the specified name. For example, the XPath profession
refers to all profession
child elements of the context
node. Exactly which elements these are depends on what the context
node is, so this is a relative XPath. For example, if the context
node is the Alan Turing person
element in Example 9-1,
then the location path profession
refers to these three profession
child elements of that element:
<profession>computer scientist</profession> <profession>mathematician</profession> <profession>cryptographer</profession>
However, if the context node is the Richard Feynman person
element in Example 9-1, then the XPath
profession
refers to its single
profession
child element:
<profession>physicist</profession>
If the context node is the name
child element of Richard Feynman or
Alan Turing’s person
element,
then this XPath doesn’t refer to anything at all because neither of
those has any profession
child
elements.
In XSLT, the context node for an XPath expression used in the
select
attribute of xsl:apply-templates
and similar elements
is the node that is currently matched. For example, consider the
simple stylesheet in Example
9-2. In particular, look at the template rule for the
person
element. The XSLT
processor will activate this rule twice, once for each person
node in the document. The first time the context node is set to Alan Turing’s ...
Get XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.