XSLT 1.0 Pocket Reference

Appendix A. XPath 1.0 Grammar

This appendix contains the entire grammar for the syntax of XPath 1.0. Refer to this section to remove any doubt about what is a syntactically valid expression.

Productions from XPath 1.0

Table A-1 through Table A-12 list the entire grammar of XPath 1.0, extracted from the XPath 1.0 Recommendation at http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath.

Table A-1. Location paths

[1]	LocationPath	RelativeLocationPath | AbsoluteLocationPath
[2]	AbsoluteLocationPath	'/' RelativeLocationPath? | AbbreviatedAbsoluteLocationPath
[3]	RelativeLocationPath	Step | RelativeLocationPath '/' Step | AbbreviatedRelativeLocationPath

Table A-2. Location steps

[4]	Step	AxisSpecifier NodeTest Predicate* | AbbreviatedStep
[5]	AxisSpecifier	AxisName '::' | AbbreviatedAxisSpecifier

Table A-3. Axes

[6]

AxisName

'ancestor' | 'ancestor-or-self' | 'attribute' | 'child' | 'descendant' | 'descendant-or-self' | 'following' | 'following-sibling' | 'namespace' | 'parent' | 'preceding' | 'preceding-sibling' | 'self'

Table A-4. Node tests

[7]

NodeTest

NameTest | NodeType '(' ')' | 'processing-instruction' '(' Literal ')'

Table A-5. Predicates

[8]	Predicate	'[' PredicateExpr ']'
[9]	PredicateExpr	Expr

Table A-6. Abbreviations

[10]	AbbreviatedAbsoluteLocation-Path	'//' RelativeLocation-Path
[11]	AbbreviatedRelativeLocation-Path	RelativeLocation-Path '//' Step
[12]	AbbreviatedStep	'.' | '..'
[13]	AbbreviatedAxisSpecifier	'@'?

Table A-7. Expressions

[14]	Expr	OrExpr
[15]	PrimaryExpr	VariableReference | '(' Expr ')' | Literal | Number | FunctionCall ...