XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference, 4th Edition (403 page)

Examples of Kind Tests

These examples show some different
KindTests
, used in the context of a containing path expression.

Expression	Description
parent::node()	Selects the parent of the context node, whether this is an element node or the root node. This differs from parent::* , which selects the parent node only if it is an element. The expression parent::node() is usually abbreviated to .. .
//comment()	Selects all comment nodes in the document.
child::text()	Selects all text node children of the context node. This is usually abbreviated to text() .
@comment()	A strange but legal way of getting an empty node-set: it looks for all comment nodes on the attribute axis, and of course finds none.
self::attribute(title)	Selects the context node if it is an attribute named title .

Predicates

We saw earlier that a step has three parts: an axis, a
NodeTest
(which is either a
NameTest
or a
KindTest
), and optionally a list of predicates. We've examined the first two parts in the preceding sections; now it's time to look at predicates.

A predicate is a qualifying expression used to select a subset of the nodes in a sequence. The predicate may be any XPath expression, and it is written in square brackets.

Expression	Syntax
PredicateList	Predicate *
Predicate	[ Expr ]