XPath Nodes

In XPath, nodes are the fundamental building blocks of XML or HTML documents. They represent different components or parts of the document’s structure. XPath allows you to navigate, select, and work with these nodes to retrieve specific data or information from the document. There are several types of nodes in XPath:

1. Element Nodes: Element nodes represent the elements (tags) in the XML or HTML document. For example:

   <book>
     <title>Harry Potter</title>
     <author>J.K. Rowling</author>
   </book>

In this XML document, <book>, <title>, and <author> are element nodes.

2. Attribute Nodes: Attribute nodes represent the attributes of an element. For example:

   <book ISBN="123456">
     <title>Harry Potter</title>
   </book>

In this XML document, the “ISBN” attribute of the <book> element is an attribute node.

3. Text Nodes: Text nodes represent the textual content within an element. For example:

   <title>Harry Potter</title>

In this XML document, “Harry Potter” is a text node within the <title> element.

4. Comment Nodes: Comment nodes represent comments within the XML or HTML document. For example:

   <!-- This is a comment -->

In this XML document, “This is a comment” is a comment node.

5. Processing Instruction Nodes: Processing instruction nodes provide instructions to the application processing the XML document. For example:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

In this XML document, the processing instruction <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> is a processing instruction node.

XPath allows you to use various expressions to select and work with these different types of nodes based on their relationships, attributes, values, or positions within the document. XPath expressions can be used to traverse the document and extract relevant data, making it a powerful tool for querying and manipulating XML or HTML structures.