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Concept
XPath
Summary
XPath (XML Path Language) is an expression language designed to support the query or transformation of XML documents. It was defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1999, and can be used to compute values (e.g., strings, numbers, or Boolean values) from the content of an XML document. Support for XPath exists in applications that support XML, such as web browsers, and many programming languages.
The XPath language is based on a tree representation of the XML document, and provides the ability to navigate around the tree, selecting nodes by a variety of criteria. In popular use (though not in the official specification), an XPath expression is often referred to simply as "an XPath".
Originally motivated by a desire to provide a common syntax and behavior model between XPointer and XSLT, subsets of the XPath query language are used in other W3C specifications such as XML Schema, XForms and the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS).
XPath has been adopted by a number of XML processing libraries and tools, many of which also offer CSS Selectors, another W3C standard, as a simpler alternative to XPath.
There are several versions of XPath in use. XPath 1.0 was published in 1999, XPath 2.0 in 2007 (with a second edition in 2010), XPath 3.0 in 2014, and XPath 3.1 in 2017. However, XPath 1.0 is still the version that is most widely available.
XPath 1.0 became a Recommendation on 16 November 1999 and is widely implemented and used, either on its own (called via an API from languages such as Java, C#, Python or JavaScript), or embedded in languages such as XSLT, XProc, XML Schema or XForms.
XPath 2.0 became a Recommendation on 23 January 2007, with a second edition published on 14 December 2010. A number of implementations exist but are not as widely used as XPath 1.0. The XPath 2.0 language specification is much larger than XPath 1.0 and changes some of the fundamental concepts of the language such as the type system.
The most notable change is that XPath 2.0 is built around the XQuery and XPath Data Model (XDM) that has a much richer type system.
Official source
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Ontological neighbourhood
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Related concepts (6)
XQuery
XQuery (XML Query) is a query and functional programming language that queries and transforms collections of structured and unstructured data, usually in the form of XML, text and with vendor-specific extensions for other data formats (JSON, binary, etc.). The language is developed by the XML Query working group of the W3C. The work is closely coordinated with the development of XSLT by the XSL Working Group; the two groups share responsibility for XPath, which is a subset of XQuery. XQuery 1.
XSLT
XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a language originally designed for transforming XML documents into other XML documents, or other formats such as HTML for web pages, plain text or XSL Formatting Objects, which may subsequently be converted to other formats, such as PDF, PostScript and PNG. Support for JSON and plain-text transformation was added in later updates to the XSLT 1.0 specification. the most recent stable version of the language is XSLT 3.0, which achieved Recommendation status in June 2017.
XML database
An XML database is a data persistence software system that allows data to be specified, and sometimes stored, in XML format. This data can be queried, transformed, exported and returned to a calling system. XML databases are a flavor of document-oriented databases which are in turn a category of NoSQL database. There are a number of reasons to directly specify data in XML or other document formats such as JSON.