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## XPath Examples * * * In this section, let's learn some basic XPath syntax through examples. * * * ## XML Example Document We will use the following XML document in the examples below: "books.xml": Giada De Laurentiis 2005 30.00 J K. Rowling 2005 29.99 James McGovern Per Bothner Kurt Cagle James Linn Vaidyanathan Nagarajan 2003 49.99 Erik T. Ray 2003 39.95 [View this "books.xml" file in your browser](#). * * * ## Loading XML Documents All modern browsers support loading XML documents using XMLHttpRequest. Code for most modern browsers: var xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest() Code for older Microsoft browsers (IE 5 and 6): var xmlhttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP") * * * ## Selecting Nodes Unfortunately, Internet Explorer handles XPath differently from other browsers. In our examples, we include code compatible with most mainstream browsers. Internet Explorer uses the selectNodes() method to select nodes from an XML document: xmlDoc.selectNodes(_xpath_); Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari use the evaluate() method to select nodes from an XML document: xmlDoc.evaluate(_xpath_, xmlDoc, null, XPathResult.ANY_TYPE,null); * * * ## Select All title Elements The following example selects all title nodes: ## Example /bookstore/book/title [Try it yourself »](#) * * * ## Select the title of the First book The following example selects the title of the first book element under the bookstore element: ## Example /bookstore/book/title [Try it yourself »](#) There is an issue here. The above example produces different results in IE and other browsers. IE5 and later treat as the first node, whereas according to the W3C standard, it should be . ### A Solution! To resolve the vs issue in IE5+, you can set the SelectionLanguage property for XPath. The following example selects the title of the first book element under the bookstore element: ## Example _xml_.setProperty("SelectionLanguage","XPath"); _xml_.selectNodes("/bookstore/book/title"); [Try it yourself »](#) * * * ## Select All price Text Content The following example selects all text content within price nodes: ## Example /bookstore/book/price/text() [Try it yourself »](#) * * * ## Select price Nodes Where Price > 35 The following example selects all price nodes where the price is greater than 35: ## Example /bookstore/book[price>35]/price [Try it yourself »](#) * * * ## Select title Nodes Where Price > 35 The following example selects all title nodes where the price is greater than 35: ## Example /bookstore/book[price>35]/title [Try it yourself »](#)