XPath axe
parent:: axis
The node directly above. Abbreviated .., and the way to select a node by what it contains.
parent:: selects the single node that contains the context node, and .. is its abbreviation. Attributes have a parent — the element they are on — even though they are not children of it.
Its main use is inverting a selection: find the interesting descendant, then step back up to the element you actually want.
- Syntax
parent::name — or ..- Returns
- node-set
- Kind
- Axe
- Version
- XPath 1.0 (libxml2)
Worked examples
Each result below is what the evaluator returned, asserted on every test run. An empty result means an empty node-set — which is an answer, not an error.
The sample documents
Every example on this page runs against this document. The sitemap one is namespaced on purpose — almost every real XML document is, and that changes which expressions match.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<order id="A-1001" tier="gold">
<customer country="NO">Ada Lovelace</customer>
<lines>
<line sku="WIDGET-1" qty="2"><price>14.50</price></line>
<line sku="WIDGET-2" qty="1"><price>39.00</price></line>
<line sku="GIFT-WRAP" qty="1"><price>0.00</price></line>
</lines>
<note> Deliver after 09:00 </note>
</order>Related
- ancestor:: and ancestor-or-self::Every node above the context, up to the root. Returned in reverse document order.
- child:: axisImmediate children. The default axis, which is why it is almost never written out.
- self:: axisThe context node itself. Abbreviated as a dot, and used to test what the current node is.
Get started
Bring order to the XML your team can't afford to ignore.
Create a free account and get a private workspace to search, validate, diff, and monitor your XML feeds, sitemaps, schemas, and vendor integrations.