Navigating Along the child Axis

Navigating Along the child Axis

The child axis selects nodes that are immediate children of the context node. For example, if the context node is the root <chairman> element:

child::president

locates a node set consisting of two <president> elements:

• <president empID="emp4390" empdate="1980-06-18">, and
• <president empID="emp4238" empdate="1984-08-12">

Assuming the same context node, changing the location step to:

child::president | child::name

will locate a node-set consisting of the above two elements and the <name>Kim Akers</name> element.

Only the root node and element nodes in a document have nodes along the child:: axis. This means that, comments, attributes, processing instructions (PIs), and namespaces do not have children. Similarly, only element nodes may be located along the child:: axis if you use a name node test, such as a specific element name, or * for all elements. If you need to select comments and PIs as well, use the node() or other node-type test. For example:

child::node()

locates all comments and PIs which are children of the context node, as well as all element children, while:

child::comment()

locates all comments which are children of the context node, while excluding all PI and element nodes.

The child:: axis is the default, if no axis is supplied in a location step. Therefore, the following are equivalent:

child::name
name

See Also

Sample XML File for Navigating XPath Axes | Constructing the Node-Test Portion of a Location Step