Overview of XML

Nodes

XPath allows the following nodes to be selected.

Root Node
Element Nodes
Attribute Nodes
Text Nodes [text()]
Comment Nodes [comment()]
Namespace Nodes
Should Namespaces be treated as nodes?
Note
Deprecated since XPath 2.0
Processing Instruction Nodes [processing-instruction()]
... any Node [node()]
Use the comment() function to match any comment.
```
//comment()
```
Returns all comments in the document.
Use the text() function to match any text nodes.
```
/bookstore/book/author/text()
```
Returns the text nodes for the all author elements.
Use the processing-instruction() function to match PIs.
```
//processing-instruction()
```
```
//processing-instruction('xml-stylesheet')
```
The first XPath returns all the PIs in the document and the second returns all 'xml-stylesheet' PIs.

XPath assumes Entities, DocTypes and CData sections to be normalized before the expression is evaluated.