Names and Values of XPath Nodes

MSXML 5.0 SDK

Microsoft XML Core Services (MSXML) 5.0 for Microsoft Office - XSLT Developer's Guide

Names and Values of XPath Nodes

In addition to specifying a node's relationship to other nodes in the tree, XPath defines a name and a string value for each node type, as follows:

Node Type Node Name Node Value
Root Empty string ("") Concatenated value of text in all descendant element nodes and text nodes.
Element Element name (expanded form, including namespace URI, if any) Concatenated value of text in all descendant element nodes and text nodes.
Attribute Attribute name (expanded form, including namespace URI, if any) The value of the attribute.
Text Empty string ("") All text in that node (multiple end-of-line sequences normalized to single newline).
Processing-instruction The target of the processing instruction Everything in the processing instruction, except for the target and the white space that follows the target.
Comment Empty string ("") All text between the opening <!-- and closing --> delimiters.
Namespace Namespace prefix (excluding ":"), or empty string (""), if no prefix is declared for the namespace The URI which is bound to the namespace.

Example

The following are some of the node names and values associated with the node tree that is presented as a diagram in XPath Nodes Example.

Node Name String Value
Root Empty string ("") "http//www.example.microsoft.com/catalogbk101$#71;Ambercrombie, KimXMLDeveloper's $#x47;uideComputer44.952000-10-01and&amp." plus text from the remaining <book> element
Comment Empty string ("") "catalog last updated 2000-10-01"
<catalog> element "catalog" "http//www.example.microsoft.com/catalogbk101$#71;Ambercrombie, KimXMLDeveloper's $#x47;uideComputer44.952000-10-01and&amp." plus text from the remaining <book> element
<book> element "book" "bk101$#71;Ambercrombie, KimXMLDeveloper's $#x47;uideComputer44.952000-10-01and&amp."
xmlns attribute "id" "http://www.example.microsoft.com/catalog"

For information about references (such as $#x47; and &amp;), see Character and Entity References.

See Also

Processing Text Strings by Using String Functions | Working with a Source Tree | Using XPath Expressions to Select Nodes | The XSLT Processor