Once we have a quantity of semistructured data gathered into an XML tree, we might want to find information within it. There are dedicated query languages to do this, and this lecture presented one of them: XPath, the XML Path Language. As well as being a query language in its own right, XPath is also a key component of many other XML and web technologies, where it is used to navigate around documents.
Areti Manataki and Allan Clark gave a brief presentation on the Edinburgh Student Experience Survey. This is for current students to give feedback to the university which will help shape and improve things in the future. If you have not already done so, please go to MyEd and complete the survey now.
Links: Log in to MyEd; About the survey.
Experimenting with XPath
There are tools online to let you try out handwritten XPath queries against sample XML documents. Here are two:
Further Reading
- Wikipedia on XPath.
- The 10-minute XPath tutorial. I think ten minutes is rather optimistic, but I do recommend the tutorial.
- The full XPath specification XML Path Language Version 1.0. This is quite challenging, but I think worth browsing to see what the full formal standard looks like.
- Other XML technologies from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).