Selecting the Parent Element with ..
A double period (..)
indicates the parent of the current node. For example, the XPath
expression //@id identifies all
id attributes in the document.
Therefore, //@id/.. identifies
all elements in the document that have id attributes. The XPath expression
//middle_initial/../first_name
identifies all first_name
elements that are siblings of middle_initial elements in the document.
Applied to Example 9-1,
this selects <first_name>Richard</first_name>
but not <first_name>Alan</first_name>.
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