XPath – Introduction

XPath (XML Path Language) is a syntax or language for finding any element on the web page using XML path expression. It is a query language for selecting nodes form XML. It is basically defined as XML Path, Where it is used to find the location of any element on a webpage using HTML DOM structure. It is also used to compute values from the content of an XML document.

XPath Syntax is based on  tree representation of the XML document, and provides the ability to navigate around the tree, selecting nodes by a variety of criteria. The main motto is to provide a common  syntax behavior model between XPointer and XSLT. It has been adopted by a number of XML processing libraries and tools, many of which also offer CSS Selectors.

XPath helps in defining parts of an XML document and uses path expressions to navigate in XML documents which contains a library of standard functions and is the major element in XSLT and in XQuery.