Using XPath in Markup

Markup provides basic ​XPath support for matching and querying event streams.

Limitations

Due to the streaming nature of the processing model, Markup uses only a subset of the ​XPath 1.0 language.

In particular, only the following axes are supported:

• attribute
• child
• descendant
• descendant-or-self
• namespace (not completed yet)
• self

This means you can't use the ancestor, parent, or sibling axes in Markup. Basically, any path expression that would require buffering of the stream is not supported.

In addition, Markup does not (yet) support numeric types in XPath: everything is treated as text or booleans. For that reason, ​relational or ​additive operators such as >, <, or <= are not supported right now.

Querying Streams

from markup.input import XML

doc = XML('''<doc>
 <items count="2">
      <item status="new">
        <summary>Foo</summary>
      </item>
      <item status="closed">
        <summary>Bar</summary>
      </item>
  </items>
</doc>''')
print doc.select('items/item[@status="closed"]/summary/text()')

This would result in the following output:

Bar

Matching in Templates

See MarkupTemplates#py:match

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See also: MarkupGuide?, MarkupStream