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The XPath expressions you've seen so far--element names, @ plus an attribute name, /, comment( ), text( ), and processing-instruction( )--are all single location steps. You can combine these with the forward slash to move around the hierarchy from the matched node to other nodes. Furthermore, you can use a period to refer to the context node, a double period to refer to the parent node, and a double forward slash to refer to descendants of the context node. With the exception of //, these are all similar to Unix shell syntax for navigating a hierarchical filesystem.
Location steps can be combined with a forward slash (/) to make a compound location path. Each step in the path is relative to the one that preceded it. If the path begins with /, then the first step in the path is relative to the root node. Otherwise, it's relative to the context node. For example, consider the XPath expression /people/person/name/first_name. This begins at the root node, then selects all people element children of the root node, then all person element children of those nodes, then all name children of those nodes, and finally all first_name children of those nodes. Applied to Example 9-1, it indicates these two elements:
<first_name>Alan</first_name> <first_name>Richard</first_name>
To indicate only the textual content of those two nodes, we have to go one step further. The XPath expression /people/person/name/first_name/text( ) selects the strings "Alan" and "Richard" from Example 9-1.
These two XPath expressions both began with /, so they're absolute location paths that start at the root. Relative location paths can also count down from the context node. For example, the XPath expression person/@id selects the id attribute of the person child elements of the context node.
A double forward slash (//) selects from all descendants of the context node, as well as the context node itself. At the beginning of an XPath expression, it selects from all descendants of the root node. For example, the XPath expression //name selects all name elements in the document. The expression //@id selects all the id attributes of any element in the document. The expression person//@id selects all the id attributes of any element contained in the person child elements of the context node, as well as the id attributes of the person elements themselves.
A double period (..) indicates the parent of the current node. For example, the XPath expression //@id identifies all id attributes in the document. Therefore, //@id/.. identifies all elements in the document that have id attributes. The XPath expression //middle_initial/../first_name identifies all first_name elements that are siblings of middle_initial elements in the document. Applied to Example 9-1, this selects <first_name>Richard</first_name> but not <first_name>Alan</first_name>.
Finally, the single period (.) indicates the context node. In XSLT this is most commonly used when you need to take the value of the currently matched node. For example, this template rule copies the content of each comment in the input document to a span element in the output document:
<xsl:template match="comment( )"> <span class="comment"><xsl:value-of select="."></span> </xsl:template>
The . given as the value of the select attribute of xsl:value-of stands for the matched node. This works equally well for element nodes, attribute nodes, and all the other kinds of nodes. For example, this template rule matches name elements from the input document and copies their value into strongly emphasized text in the output document:
<xsl:template match="name"> <strong><xsl:value-of select="."></strong> </xsl:template>
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| 9.2. Location Paths |  | 9.4. Predicates |
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