C XPath and Namespace Primer

Evaluating Subexpressions

The variable bindings, function library, and namespace declarations used to evaluate a subexpression are always the same as those used to evaluate the containing expression.

The context node, context position, and context size used to evaluate a subexpression are sometimes different from those used to evaluate the containing expression. Several kinds of expressions change the context node; only predicates change the context position and context size. When the evaluation of a kind of expression is described, it will always be explicitly stated if the context node, context position, and context size change for the evaluation of subexpressions; if nothing is said about the context node, context position, and context size, then they remain unchanged for the evaluation of subexpressions of that kind of expression.

Attribute Abbreviation @

There is also an abbreviation for attributes: attribute:: can be abbreviated to @.

For example, a location path para[@type="warning"] is short for child::para[attribute::type="warning"] and so selects para children with a type attribute with value equal to warning.

Path Abbreviation //

// is short for /descendant-or-self::node()/. For example, //para is short for /descendant-or-self::node()/child::para and so will select any para element in the document (even a para element that is a document element will be selected by //para because the document element node is a child of the root node);

div//para is short for div/descendant-or-self::node()/child::para and so will select all para descendants of div children.

Location Step Abbreviation .

A location step of . is short for self::node(). This is particularly useful in conjunction with //. For example, the location path .//para is short for:

self::node()/descendant-or-self::node()/child::para

and so will select all para descendant elements of the context node.

Location Step Abbreviation ..

Similarly, a location step of .. is short for parent::node(). For example, ../title is short for:

parent::node()/child::title

and so will select the title children of the parent of the context node.

Abbreviation Summary

AbbreviatedAbsoluteLocationPath ::= '//' RelativeLocationPath

AbbreviatedRelativeLocationPath ::= RelativeLocationPath '//' Step

AbbreviatedStep ::= '.' | '..'

AbbreviatedAxisSpecifier ::= '@'?

Root Nodes

The root node is the root of the tree. It does not occur except as the root of the tree. The element node for the document element is a child of the root node. The root node also has as children processing instruction and comment nodes for processing instructions and comments that occur in the prolog and after the end of the document element. The string-value of the root node is the concatenation of the string-values of all text node descendants of the root node in document order. The root node does not have an expanded-name.

Element Nodes

There is an element node for every element in the document. An element node has an expanded-name computed by expanding the QName of the element specified in the tag in accordance with the XML Namespaces Recommendation. The namespace URI of the element expanded-name will be null if the QName has no prefix and there is no applicable default namespace.

The children of an element node are the element nodes, comment nodes, processing instruction nodes and text nodes for its content. Entity references to both internal and external entities are expanded. Character references are resolved. The string-value of an element node is the concatenation of the string-values of all text node descendants of the element node in document order.

Unique IDs. An element node may have a unique identifier (ID). This is the value of the attribute that is declared in the Document Type Definition (DTD) as type ID. No two elements in a document may have the same unique ID. If an XML processor reports two elements in a document as having the same unique ID (which is possible only if the document is invalid), then the second element in document order must be treated as not having a unique ID.

Text Nodes

Character data is grouped into text nodes. As much character data as possible is grouped into each text node: a text node never has an immediately following or preceding sibling that is a text node. The string-value of a text node is the character data. A text node always has at least one character of data. Each character within a CDATA section is treated as character data. Thus, <![CDATA[<]]> in the source document will treated the same as <. Both will result in a single < character in a text node in the tree. Thus, a CDATA section is treated as if the <![CDATA[ and ]]> were removed and every occurrence of < and & were replaced by < and & respectively.

Attribute Nodes

Each element node has an associated set of attribute nodes; the element is the parent of each of these attribute nodes; however, an attribute node is not a child of its parent element.

Elements never share attribute nodes: if one element node is not the same node as another element node, then none of the attribute nodes of the one element node will be the same node as the attribute nodes of another element node.

A defaulted attribute is treated the same as a specified attribute. If an attribute was declared for the element type in the DTD, but the default was declared as #IMPLIED, and the attribute was not specified on the element, then the element attribute set does not contain a node for the attribute.

Some attributes, such as xml:lang and xml:space, have the semantics that they apply to all elements that are descendants of the element bearing the attribute, unless overridden with an instance of the same attribute on another descendant element. However, this does not affect where attribute nodes appear in the tree: an element has attribute nodes only for attributes that were explicitly specified in the start-tag or empty-element tag of that element or that were explicitly declared in the DTD with a default value.

An attribute node has an expanded-name and a string-value. The expanded-name is computed by expanding the QName specified in the tag in the XML document in accordance with the XML Namespaces Recommendation. The namespace URI of the attribute name will be null if the QName of the attribute does not have a prefix.

An attribute node has a string-value. The string-value is the normalized value as specified by the XML Recommendation. An attribute whose normalized value is a zero-length string is not treated specially: it results in an attribute node whose string-value is a zero-length string.

There are no attribute nodes corresponding to attributes that declare namespaces.

Namespace Nodes

Each element has an associated set of namespace nodes, one for each distinct namespace prefix that is in scope for the element (including the xml prefix, which is implicitly declared by the XML Namespaces Recommendation) and one for the default namespace if one is in scope for the element. The element is the parent of each of these namespace nodes; however, a namespace node is not a child of its parent element.

Elements never share namespace nodes: if one element node is not the same node as another element node, then none of the namespace nodes of the one element node will be the same node as the namespace nodes of another element node. This means that an element will have a namespace node:

• For every attribute on the element whose name starts with xmlns:;

• For every attribute on an ancestor element whose name starts xmlns: unless the element itself or a nearer ancestor re-declares the prefix;

• For an xmlns attribute, if the element or some ancestor has an xmlns attribute, and the value of the xmlns attribute for the nearest such element is non-empty

  
  

  Note: An attribute xmlns="" undeclares the default namespace.

  
  

A namespace node has an expanded-name: the local part is the namespace prefix (this is empty if the namespace node is for the default namespace); the namespace URI is always NULL.

The string-value of a namespace node is the namespace URI that is being bound to the namespace prefix; if it is relative, then it must be resolved just like a namespace URI in an expanded-name.

Processing Instruction Nodes

There is a processing instruction node for every processing instruction, except for any processing instruction that occurs within the document type declaration. A processing instruction has an expanded-name: the local part is the processing instruction target; the namespace URI is NULL. The string-value of a processing instruction node is the part of the processing instruction following the target and any whitespace. It does not include the terminating ?>.

Comment Nodes

There is a comment node for every comment, except for any comment that occurs within the document type declaration. The string-value of comment is the content of the comment not including the opening <!-- or the closing -->. A comment node does not have an expanded-name.

For every type of node, there is a way of determining a string-value for a node of that type. For some types of node, the string-value is part of the node; for other types of node, the string-value is computed from the string-value of descendant nodes.

Expanded-Name

Some types of node also have an expanded-name, which is a pair consisting of:

• A local part. This is a string.

• A namespace URI. The namespace URI is either null or a string. If specified in the XML document it can be a URI reference as defined in RFC2396; this means it can have a fragment identifier and be relative. A relative URI should be resolved into an absolute URI during namespace processing: the namespace URIs of expanded-names of nodes in the data model should be absolute.

Two expanded-names are equal if they have the same local part, and either both have a null namespace URI or both have non-null namespace URIs that are equal.

Document Order

There is an ordering, document order, defined on all the nodes in the document corresponding to the order in which the first character of the XML representation of each node occurs in the XML representation of the document after expansion of general entities. Thus, the root node will be the first node.

Element nodes occur before their children. Thus, document order orders element nodes in order of the occurrence of their start-tag in the XML (after expansion of entities). The attribute nodes and namespace nodes of an element occur before the children of the element. The namespace nodes are defined to occur before the attribute nodes.

The relative order of namespace nodes is implementation-dependent.

The relative order of attribute nodes is implementation-dependent.

Reverse document order is the reverse of document order.

Root nodes and element nodes have an ordered list of child nodes. Nodes never share children: if one node is not the same node as another node, then none of the children of the one node will be the same node as any of the children of another node.

Every node other than the root node has exactly one parent, which is either an element node or the root node. A root node or an element node is the parent of each of its child nodes. The descendants of a node are the children of the node and the descendants of the children of the node.

URI References

URI references which identify namespaces are considered identical when they are exactly the same character-for-character. Note that URI references which are not identical in this sense may in fact be functionally equivalent. Examples include URI references which differ only in case, or which are in external entities which have different effective base URIs.

Names from XML namespaces may appear as qualified names, which contain a single colon, separating the name into a namespace prefix and a local part.

The prefix, which is mapped to a URI reference, selects a namespace. The combination of the universally managed URI namespace and the namespace of the document produces identifiers that are universally unique. Mechanisms are provided for prefix scoping and defaulting.

URI references can contain characters not allowed in names, so cannot be used directly as namespace prefixes. Therefore, the namespace prefix serves as a proxy for a URI reference. An attribute-based syntax described in the following section is used to declare the association of the namespace prefix with a URI reference; software which supports this namespace proposal must recognize and act on these declarations and prefixes.

Notation and Usage

Many of the nonterminals in the productions in this specification are defined not here but in the W3C XML Recommendation. When nonterminals defined here have the same names as nonterminals defined in the W3C XML Recommendation, the productions here in all cases match a subset of the strings matched by the corresponding ones there.

In productions of this document, the NSC is a Namespace Constraint, one of the rules that documents conforming to this specification must follow.

All Internet domain names used in examples, with the exception of w3.org, are selected at random and should not be taken as having any import.

Declaring Namespaces

A namespace is declared using a family of reserved attributes. Such an attribute name must either be xmlns or have xmlns: as a prefix. These attributes, like any other XML attributes, can be provided directly or by default.

Attribute Names for Namespace Declaration

[1] NSAttName ::=    PrefixedAttName
                     | DefaultAttName
[2] PrefixedAttName ::= 'xmlns:' NCName
                                                                                     [NSC: Leading "XML" ]
[3] DefaultAttName ::= 'xmlns'
[4] NCName ::= (Letter | '_') (NCNameChar)*
                                                                                    /* An XML Name, minus the ":" */
[5] NCNameChar ::= Letter | Digit | '.' | '-' | '_' | CombiningChar
                     | Extender

The attribute value, a URI reference, is the namespace name identifying the namespace. The namespace name, to serve its intended purpose, should have the characteristics of uniqueness and persistence. It is not a goal that it be directly usable for retrieval of a schema (if any exists). An example of a syntax that is designed with these goals in mind is that for Uniform Resource Names [RFC2141]. However, it should be noted that ordinary URLs can be managed in such a way as to achieve these same goals.

When the Attribute Name Matches the PrefixedAttName

If the attribute name matches PrefixedAttName, then the NCName gives the namespace prefix, used to associate element and attribute names with the namespace name in the attribute value in the scope of the element to which the declaration is attached. In such declarations, the namespace name may not be empty.

When the Attribute Name Matches the DefaultAttName

If the attribute name matches DefaultAttName, then the namespace name in the attribute value is that of the default namespace in the scope of the element to which the declaration is attached. In such a default declaration, the attribute value may be empty. Default namespaces and overriding of declarations are discussed in section "Applying Namespaces to Elements and Attributes" of the W3C Namespace Recommendation.

The following example namespace declaration associates the namespace prefix edi with the namespace name http://ecommerce.org/schema:

<x xmlns:edi='http://ecommerce.org/schema'>
  <!-- the "edi" prefix is bound to http://ecommerce.org/schema
       for the "x" element and contents -->
</x>

Namespace Constraint: Leading "XML"

Prefixes beginning with the three-letter sequence x, m, l, in any case combination, are reserved for use by XML and XML-related specifications.

Qualified Name Syntax

[6] QName ::= (Prefix ':')? LocalPart
[7] Prefix ::= NCName
[8] LocalPart::= NCName

What is the Prefix?

The Prefix provides the namespace prefix part of the qualified name, and must be associated with a namespace URI reference in a namespace declaration.

The LocalPart provides the local part of the qualified name. Note that the prefix functions only as a placeholder for a namespace name. Applications should use the namespace name, not the prefix, in constructing names whose scope extends beyond the containing document.

Element Types

[9]  STag ::= '<' QName (S Attribute)* S? '>' [NSC: Prefix Declared ]
[10] ETag::= '</' QName S? '>'[NSC: Prefix Declared ]
[11] EmptyElemTag ::= '<' QName (S Attribute)* S? '/>' [NSC: Prefix Declared ]

The following is an example of a qualified name serving as an element type:

<x xmlns:edi='http://ecommerce.org/schema'>
  <!-- the 'price' element's namespace is http://ecommerce.org/schema -->
  <edi:price units='Euro'>32.18</edi:price>
</x>

Attributes are either namespace declarations or their names are given as qualified names:

Attribute

[12] Attribute::= NSAttName Eq AttValue|QName Eq AttValue [NSC:Prefix Declared]

The following is an example of a qualified name serving as an attribute name:

<x xmlns:edi='http://ecommerce.org/schema'>
   <!-- the 'taxClass' attribute's namespace is http://ecommerce.org/schema -->
   <lineItem edi:taxClass="exempt">Baby food</lineItem>
</x>

Qualified Names in Declarations

[13] doctypedecl::= '<!DOCTYPE' S QName (S ExternalID)? S? ('[' (markupdecl | 
                     PEReference | S)* ']' S?)? '>'
[14] elementdecl::= '<!ELEMENT' S QName S contentspec S? '>'
[15] cp         ::= (QName | choice | seq) ('?' | '*' | '+')?
[16] Mixed      ::= '(' S? '#PCDATA' (S? '|' S? QName)* S? ')*' 
                     | '(' S? '#PCDATA' S? ')' 
[17] AttlistDecl::= '<!ATTLIST' S QName AttDef* S? '>'
[18] AttDef     ::=  S (QName | NSAttName) S AttType S DefaultDecl

Entities

An information set describes its XML document with entity references already expanded, that is, represented by the information items corresponding to their replacement text. However, there are various circumstances in which a processor may not perform this expansion. An entity may not be declared, or may not be retrievable. A non-validating processor may choose not to read all declarations, and even if it does, may not expand all external entities. In these cases an un-expanded entity reference information item is used to represent the entity reference.