xml-dev - Re: Simplicity of XPath

[Miloslav Nic <nicmila@idoox.com>]

In last few months I had to answer quite a few XPath related 
questions so I am speaking from some experience

/html/body/p
//table

are very easy to grasp

//body/p[@id=name(//head/meta[3])]/span[position()=last()]/preceding-sibling::*[starts-with(name(),'s')]

needs a bit of experience

It is like a regular expressions:

match: abc is very easy
match: (a|b) not so difficult
today I needed:  (\(|\)) and a colleague did not understand and it is
just a previous case with parentheses instead of letters

The good thing about XPath is a reasonable learning curve:
you will learn basics in 30 minutes and learn and learn years to come

You may find these Zvon resources useful:

http://zvon.org/xxl/XPathTutorial/General/examples.html
http://www.zvon.org/cgi-bin/xlab/bin/xpath.py
http://www.zvon.org/cgi-bin/xlab/bin/xpathAxes.py


Matt Sergeant wrote:
> 
> "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" wrote:
> >
> > Being able to reapply XPath has advantages
> > on the learning curve although the syntax of XPath isn't
> > all that easy to learn.
> 
> I always thought it was one of the easier aspects to pick up. Is there a
> general consensus on this matter?
> 
> Or is it that the simple (abbreviated) parts of XPath are easy, but the
> non-abbreviated parts are hard?
> 
> --
> <Matt/>
> 
>     /||    ** Director and CTO **
>    //||    **  AxKit.com Ltd   **  ** XML Application Serving **
>   // ||    ** http://axkit.org **  ** XSLT, XPathScript, XSP  **
>  // \\| // **     Personal Web Site: http://sergeant.org/     **
>      \\//
>      //\\
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