• 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
      • Restrictions
      • Attributes
    • 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 > Wildcards in Queries

Wildcards in Queries

In a query, you can include an asterisk (*) to represent all elements. For example:

/bookstore/book/*
               

            

This query searches for all book elements in bookstore. For each book element, this query returns all child elements that the book element contains.

The * collection returns all elements that are children of the context node, regardless of their tag names.

The next query finds all last-name elements that are grandchildren of book elements in the current context:

book/*/last-name 
               

            

The following query returns the grandchild elements of the current context.

*/* 
               

            

Restrictions

Usually, the asterisk (*) returns only elements. It does not return processing instructions, attributes, or comments, nor does it include attributes or comments when it maintains a count of nodes. For example, the following query returns title elements. It does not return style attributes.

/bookstore/book/*[1]
               

            

Wildcards in strings are not allowed. For example, you cannot define a query such as the following:

/bookstore/book[author=" A* "]
               

            

Attributes

To use a wildcard for attributes, you can specify @*. For example:

/bookstore/book/@*
               

            

For each book element, this query returns all attributes. It does not return any elements.