This example used another function - ends-with() - that's new in XPath 2.0. We are calling it inside a predicate (the expression between the square brackets), which defines a condition that nodes must satisfy in order to be selected. This XPath expression has two parts: a path .//actors/actor that indicates which elements we are interested in, and a predicate [ends-with(., `Lisa')] that indicates a test that the nodes must satisfy. The predicate is evaluated once for each selected element; within the predicate, the expression "." (dot) refers to the node that the predicate is testing, that is, the selected actor.

The "/" in the path informally means "go down one level", while the "//" means "go down any number of levels". If the path starts with "./" or ".//" you can leave out the initial ".". (This assumes that the selection starts from the top of the tree, which is always the case in our examples.) You can also use constructs like "/.." to go up one level, and "/@id" to select an attribute. Again, this is all familiar if you already know XPath.

XPath is capable of doing some pretty powerful selections, and before we move on to XQuery proper, let us look at a more complex example. Suppose we want to find the titles of all the videos featuring an actor whose first name is Lisa. If we look at the videos.xml file, we see that each video in the file is represented by a video element like this one: