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Using XPath to Select Nodes
XPath is a special query language the is specifically used for selecting nodes in an XML document.
With these language, you dont have to search for the entire tree of the XML nodes. You will learn the
basics of these language and apply it to a program. The two methods used for selecting nodes using the
XPath language are the XmlNode.SelectNodes() and the XmlNode.SelectSingleNode(). The
SelectNodes() method returns a XmlNodeList which contains all the nodes that matches the XPath string.
Consider the following XML document.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Persons>
<Person name="John Smith">
<Age>30</Age>
<Gender>Male</Gender>
</Person>
<Person name="Mike Folley">
<Age>25</Age>
<Gender>Male</Gender>
</Person>
<Person name="Lisa Carter">
<Age>22</Age>
<Gender>Female</Gender>
</Person>
<Person name="Jerry Frost">
<Age>27</Age>
<Gender>Male</Gender>
</Person>
<Person name="Adam Wong">
<Age>35</Age>
<Gender>Male</Gender>
</Person>
</Persons>
Figure 1
Suppose you want to get the age of every person, the code for doing that is:
XmlDocument document = new XmlDocument();
document.Load("Persons.xml");
XmlNodeList nodes = document.DocumentElement.SelectNodes("/Persons/Person/Age");
foreach(XmlNode node in nodes)
{
textBoxResult.Text += node.InnerText + "\r\n";
}
Using XPath to Select Nodes | Visual C# Tutorials http://visualcsharptutorials.com/net-framework/using-xpath-to-select-...
1 od 5 21.2.2012. 2:03
After loading the document, we used the DocumentElement property which is of type XmlNode. We used
the SelectNodes() method which accepts a string argument that contains the XPath query. The XPath
query /Persons/Person/Age tells that get Age element that is a child of a Person element which is a child
of the Persons element. All the matching nodes will then be returned as an XmlNodeList. We used a
foreach loop to print each age in a text box. Figure 2 shows you some XPath operations that you can use
to query specific nodes.
XPath Query Description
. Selects the current node.
.. Selects the parent of the current node.
* Selects all the child of the current node.
nodename Selects all child nodes specified by the name.
/ Selects the root node.
//
Selects nodes from the current node that match the selection
expression no matter where they are.
//* Selects all elements in the document.
/element
Selects the root element named element. Staring a path
with a / means you are using an absolute path to an element.
/element/* Selects all the child of the root element.
element/* Selects all the child nodes of a child element.
element/child
Selects the child elements which are a child of a specified child
element of the current node.
//element
Selects all elements with the specified name regardless of
where they are in the document.
element//child
Selects all child elements of the parent regardless of
where they are inside the parent element.
@attribute
Selects an attribute of the current node where attribute
is the name of the attribute.
//@attribute
Selects all the attributes specified by its name regardless of
where they are in the document.
@* Selects all attribute of the current node.
element[i] Selects an element with the specified element name and the specified index.
text() Selects the text of all the child nodes of the current element.
//text() Selects text of every element in the document.
//element/text() Selects the text of all the matching elements.
//element[name='value'] Selects all elements with a child containing a specified value.
//element[@att='value'] Selects all elements with the specified attribute having the specified value.
Figure 2 XPath Operations
For example, if you want to select the current node, then you will use the . operator.
XmlNode current = document.DocumentElement.SelectSingleNode(".");
Notice that we used the XmlNode.SelectSingleNode() method to only select 1 node. In case of multiple
results, it will return the first matching node. The method accepted the XPath string as its argument.
Passing . will result on returning the actual node that calls it. Also notice that the returned value is an
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2 od 5 21.2.2012. 2:03
XmlNode and not an XmlNodeList.
Suppose you want to select all the Person elements which are children of the Persons node. You can use
the following XPath query.
XmlNodeList personNodes =
document.DocumentElement.SelectNodes("/Persons/Person");
Notice that we started the query with a slash (/). This indicates that we are using an absolute path. We start
fromt he Persons root node, then we look at all the Person nodes which is a direct child of the root node. If
we are to get every age of each person, then we can use the following code.
XmlNodeList personNodes =
document.DocumentElement.SelectNodes("/Persons/Person/Age");
You can also use a relative path where the searching starts from the current node. For example, you can
query all the Person node from the DocumentElement root node using the following code:
XmlNodeList personNodes =
document.DocumentElement.SelectNodes("Person");
or the age of every person usign the following code:
XmlNodeList personNodes =
document.DocumentElement.SelectNodes("Person/Age");
Notice that we didnt precede the XPath query with a / to indicate that we are using a relative path.
We can also query nodes regardless of where they are in the document. This is usefull when you want to
search the whole document and return all matching nodes. For example, if you want to query all the
Gender nodes, even if you are starting from the root node, then you can use the following query:
XmlNodeList personNodes =
document.DocumentElement.SelectNodes("//Gender");
We precede the element name with // to indicate that the whole document should be searched. The query
will now return all the matching nodes wherever they are in the document. If you want to limit the area
where the searching will be done, then you can specify the parent node or root node where the searching
will start.
XmlNodeList personNodes =
document.DocumentElement.SelectNodes("/Persons//Gender");
The above code will search for all Gender elements under the Persons node.
If you want to query specific elements, then you can use their index. The following queries the third child
of the Persons element.
XmlNode personNodes =
document.DocumentElement.SelectSingleNode("/Persons/Person[3]");
Since we are querying a single node, we used the SelectSingleNode() method. The third Person element is
represented by Person[3] where we used 3 as the index. Note that indices are base-1, so the counting starts
with 1 and not 0 as opposed to arrays in C#.
If you want to search for all the person who has a gender of male, then you can use the following code.
XmlNodeList personNodes =
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3 od 5 21.2.2012. 2:03
Like
document.DocumentElement.SelectNodes("//Person[Gender='Male']");
Since we used a double slash (//), then the whole document will be searched. Inside the bracket, we
specify the name of the child element and after that, we specified what the value should be. The value
must be enclosed in single quotes if it represents a string.
When dealign with attributes of elements, you can use the @ operator followed by the name of the
attribute. For example, the following prints all the name of every person.
XmlNodeList list = document.DocumentElement.SelectNodes(@"//Person/@name");
foreach (XmlNode node in list)
{
textBox1.Text += node.Value + "\r\n";
}
XPath is a big topic and only some basic components was discussed here. If you want to study everything
about XPath, then you can go to the following link:
http://www.w3schools.com/xpath/default.asp
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can u tell me how to edit only age in the program as i m beginner i didn't get the answer by
using the above commands. can u plz give me the code...
Hello, you can use the following code to get all the Age element from the XML file:
XmlNodeList list = doc.SelectNodes("Persons/Person/Age");
Then you can specify the index of the person you want to edit the age, for example, if
you want to edit the age of the first person, you would do the following:
list[0].InnerText = "20";
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4 od 5 21.2.2012. 2:03
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Replace 20 with the new age you want to assign.
very nice and useful
Using XPath to Select Nodes | Visual C# Tutorials http://visualcsharptutorials.com/net-framework/using-xpath-to-select-...
5 od 5 21.2.2012. 2:03