Obtaining All Elements of a Particular Name

Sometimes you want all like-named elements regardless of where they are in a document. In this case, you do not need to start at the root node and navigate to the elements you want.

For example, the following query returns all last-name elements in any XML document:

The double forward slash (//) at the beginning of a query instructs the XPath processor to start at the root node and search the entire document. In other words, the XPath processor searches all descendants of the root node.

If you perform this query on bookstore.xml, it returns the last-name elements that are children of author elements, and it also returns the last-name element that is a child of a publication element.