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Obtaining All Elements of a Particular Name
Obtaining All Elements of a Particular Name
Sometimes you want all like-named elements regardless of where they are in a document. In this case, you do not need to start at the root node and navigate to the elements you want.
For example, the following query returns all
last-name
elements in any XML document:
The double forward slash (//) at the beginning of a query instructs the XPath processor to start at the root node and search the entire document. In other words, the XPath processor searches all descendants of the root node.
If you perform this query on
bookstore.xml
, it returns the
last-name
elements that are children of
author
elements, and it also returns the
last-name
element that is a child of a
publication
element.