XPath Attributes

To select an attribute using XPath, you prefix the attribute's name with a @ symbol.

Example of Selecting an Attribute

Consider the following XML document. Note that the artist node now has an attribute called status:

If we wanted to select the status attribute of the artist node under the rock node, we could use the following expression:

Another Example

Attributes, just like any other node, can be the subject of a conditional statement.

For example, imagine we're using XSLT to transform our XML document, and we want to select all artist nodes where the status attribute is set to active. We could use the XSL if element to test the value.

Here's what we would write: