XML newbie questions

[williamkusumo]

I am not sure if this is the right place to talk about this, so forgive this newbie.
I am just starting to learn how to use .NET stuff (particularly ASP and C# for web development) and my friend mentioned something about XPATH and XML. After scanning some article in google, I came to a conclusion that XPATH is like some sort of query language for code (for example in C#) to interface with XML files, am I correct? It is rather difficult for me to find a good tutorial for a beginners in these topics so I appreciate any suggestion.

Thanks for all yor help,
William

 

[kamper]

I think you've got the idea... XPath is a specification for a syntax for accessing xml documents. It's basically an easy reliable way to access parts of an xml document in a language non-specific way. I guess you could sorta say that xpath is to xml as sql is to relational data?? Anyways, xpath is not software. Someone will have to implement an xpath processor to operate on an xml dom representation in whatever language you want to use.

Here's a tutorial to get you started if you're interested.

If you're looking for free implementations to play with check out apache although I don't know if they support .NET. Guaranteed someone's done it for .NET though.

 

[UCJefe]

System.Xml.XPath is a pretty good place to start in .NET

 

[Beau]

W3Schools has a really good XPath tutorial