• Chapter 1: Getting Started with Stylus Studio®
• Chapter 2: Editing and Querying XML
• Chapter 3: Converting Non-XML Files to XML
• Chapter 4: Working with XSLT
• Chapter 5: Creating XSLT Using the XSLT Mapper
• Chapter 6: Debugging Stylesheets
• Chapter 7: Defining XML Schemas
• Chapter 8: Defining Document Type Definitions
• Chapter 9: Writing XPath Expressions
  • About the XPath Processor
  • Using the XPath Query Editor
  • Sample Data for Examples and Practice
  • Getting Started with Queries
    • Obtaining All Marked-Up Text
    • Obtaining a Portion of an XML Document
    • Obtaining All Elements of a Particular Name
    • Obtaining All Elements of a Particular Name from a Particular Branch
    • Different Results from Similar Queries
    • Queries That Return More Than You Want
    • Specifying Attributes in Queries
    • Filtering Results of Queries
    • Wildcards in Queries
    • Calling Functions in Queries
    • Case Sensitivity and Blank Spaces in Queries
    • Precedence of Query Operators
  • Specifying the Nodes to Evaluate
  • Handling Strings and Text
  • Specifying Boolean Expressions and Functions
  • Specifying Number Operations and Functions
  • Comparing Values
  • Finding a Particular Node
  • Obtaining a Union
  • Obtaining Information About a Node or a Node Set
  • Using XPath Expressions in Stylesheets
  • Accessing Other Documents During Query Execution
  • XPath Quick Reference
• Chapter 10: Working with XQuery in Stylus Studio
• Chapter 11: Composing Web Service Calls
• Chapter 12: Accessing Relational Data as XML
• Chapter 13: Building XML Pipelines
• Chapter 14: Publishing XML Data
• Chapter 15: Integrating with Third-Party File Systems
• Chapter 16: Extending Stylus Studio
• Chapter 17: The Stylus Studio Java API
• Chapter 18: Stylus Studio GUI Reference

Home > Online Product Documentation > Table of Contents > Obtaining a Portion of an XML Document

Obtaining a Portion of an XML Document

Usually, you use a query to obtain a portion of an XML document. To obtain the particular elements that you want, you must understand how to obtain an element that is a child of the document element. With this information, you can obtain any elements in the document.

The following figure shows how the XPath processor interprets the /bookstore/book query:

When the XPath processor starts its search at the root node, there is only one element among the immediate children of the root node. This is the document element. In this example, bookstore is the document element.

The query in this figure returns the book elements that are children of bookstore. This query does not return the my:book element, which is also a child of bookstore.

Now you can define queries that obtain any elements you want. For example:

/bookstore/book/title
               

            

This query returns title elements contained in book elements that are contained in bookstore.