General/XPath is a sort of query language for XML. You can access any node within a document with a simple expression. The shorthand form looks much like a UNIX file path.
Consider this simple XML-document
/persons/person[1]
retrieves the first person-element that is a child of the root node (“/” is the root node).
/persons/person[@id="811201"]
retrieves all person-elements that are children of the root element and has an attribute (“@
//name
retrieves all name-elements in the document
//person/@id
retrieves all id attributes of person-elements in the document.
/persons//name
retrieves all name-elements in the document that are descendants of person-elements (that are children of the root node)
Double-quotes and single-quotes are equivalent.
See http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath for more info.
– General/TheoHultberg/Iconara
General/IconaraDOM has basic General/XPath-support for working with XML-documents in Cocoa. General/XMLTree has some General/XPath-support, too.
Tiger introduces the General/NSXml classes, which include General/XPath support.