Obtaining All Marked-Up Text

When you query a document, you do not usually want to obtain all marked-up text. However, an understanding of queries that return all marked-up text makes it easier to define a query that retrieves just what you want.

The following figure shows a complete query (/bookstore) and the way the XPath processor interprets it:

In the query, the initial forward slash (/) instructs the XPath processor to start its search at the root node.

Suppose you run the following query on bookstore.xml:

/book