理解xpath||lxml||markup||markdown

• XML

  Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable.

  The design goals of XML emphasize simplictiy, generality, and usability across the Internet.

  Markup language

  A markup language is a system for annotating a document in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from the text, meaning when the document is processed for display, the markup language is not shown, and is only used to format the text.

  Markdown

  Markdown is a lightweight markup language with plain-text-formatting syntax, created in 2004 by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz.

• XPath

  XPath(XML Path Language) is a query language for selecting nodes from an XML document. XPath was defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

  The XPath language is based on a tree representation of the XML document, an XPath expression is often referred to simply as “an XPath”.

• XPath syntax & tutorial

  XML Path Language (XPath) 3.0

  XPath Tutorial

• Terminology

  XPath Nodes has several kinds: element, attribute, text, namespace, processing-instruction, comment, and document nodes.

  XML documents are treated as trees of nodes. The topmost element of the tree is called the root element.

  Atomic values are nodes with no children or parent.

  Items are atomic values or nodes.

  XPath axes represents a relationship to the context (current) node, and is used to locate nodes relative to that node on the tree.

• Relationship of Nodes

  1. Parent

     Each element and attribute has one parent.

  2. Children

     Element nodes may have zero, one or more children.

  3. Siblings

     Nodes that have the same parent.

  4. Ancestors

     A node’s parent, parent’s parent, etc.

  5. Descendants

     A node’s children, children’s children.

• XPath Syntax

  XPath uses path expressions to select nodes or node-sets in an XML document.

  Expression	Description
  nodename	Selects all nodes with the name “nodename”
  /	Selects from the root node
  //	Selects nodes in the document from the current node that match the selection no matter where they are
  .	Selects the current node
  …	Selects the parent of the current node
  @	Selects attributes
  /bookstore/book[1]	Predicates, used to find a specific node
  *	Matches any element node
  @*	Matches any attribute node
  node()	Matches any node of any kind
  |	and

• Axes

  axisname::node[predicate]
  child::book
  

  AxisName	Result
  ancestor	Selects all ancestors (parent, grandparent, etc.) of the current node
  ancestor-or-self	Selects all ancestors (parent, grandparent, etc.) of the current node and the current node itself
  attribute	Selects all attributes of the current node
  child	Selects all children of the current node
  descendant	Selects all descendants (children, grandchildren, etc.) of the current node
  descendant-or-self	Selects all descendants (children, grandchildren, etc.) of the current node and the current node itself
  following	Selects everything in the document after the closing tag of the current node
  following-sibling	Selects all siblings after the current node
  namespace	Selects all namespace nodes of the current node
  parent	Selects the parent of the current node
  preceding	Selects all nodes that appear before the current node in the document, except ancestors, attribute nodes and namespace nodes
  preceding-sibling	Selects all siblings before the current node
  self	Selects the current node

• XPath Operators

  An XPath expression returns either a node-set, a string, a Boolean, or a number.

  Operator	Description	Example
  |	Computes two node-sets	//book | //cd
  +	Addition	6 + 4
  -	Subtraction	6 - 4
  *	Multiplication	6 * 4
  div	Division	8 div 4
  =	Equal	price=9.80
  !=	Not equal	price!=9.80
  <	Less than	price<9.80
  <=	Less than or equal to	price<=9.80
  >	Greater than	price>9.80
  >=	Greater than or equal to	price>=9.80
  or	or	price=9.80 or price=9.70
  and	and	price>9.00 and price<9.90
  mod	Modulus (division remainder)	5 mod 2

• XSLT

  XPath is a major element in the XSLT standard.

  XSLT(Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) is a language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents, or other formats such as HTML for web pages, plain text or XSL Formatting Objects, which may subsequently be converted to other formats, such as PDF, PostScript and PNG.

• Python module : lxml

  参见《理解lxml module in Python》