document.evaluate

Returns an XPathResult based on an XPath expression and other given parameters.

Syntax

var xpathResult = document.evaluate(
  xpathExpression,
  contextNode,
  namespaceResolver,
  resultType,
  result
);

• xpathExpression is a string representing the XPath to be evaluated.
• contextNode specifies the context node for the query (see the XPath specification). It's common to pass document as the context node.
• namespaceResolver is a function that will be passed any namespace prefixes and should return a string representing the namespace URI associated with that prefix. It will be used to resolve prefixes within the XPath itself, so that they can be matched with the document. null is common for HTML documents or when no namespace prefixes are used.
• resultType is an integer that corresponds to the type of result XPathResult to return. Use named constant properties, such as XPathResult.ANY_TYPE, of the XPathResult constructor, which correspond to integers from 0 to 9.
• result is an existing XPathResult to use for the results. null is the most common and will create a new XPathResult

Example

var headings = document.evaluate("/html/body//h2", document, null, XPathResult.ANY_TYPE, null); 
/* Search the document for all h2 elements.  
 * The result will likely be an unordered node iterator. */
var thisHeading = headings.iterateNext(); 
var alertText = "Level 2 headings in this document are:\n";
while (thisHeading) {
  alertText += thisHeading.textContent + "\n";
  thisHeading = headings.iterateNext();
}
alert(alertText); // Alerts the text of all h2 elements

Note, in the above example, a more verbose XPath is preferred over common shortcuts such as //h2. Generally, more specific XPath selectors as in the above example usually gives a significant performance improvement, especially on very large documents. This is because the evaluation of the query spends does not waste time visiting unnecessary nodes. Using // is generally slow as it visits every node from the root and all subnodes looking for possible matches.

Further optimization can be achieved by careful use of the context parameter. For example, if you know the content you are looking for is somewhere inside the body tag, you can use this:

document.evaluate(".//h2", document.body, null, XPathResult.ANY_TYPE, null);

Notice in the above document.body has been used as the context instead of document so the XPath starts from the body element. (In this example, the "." is important to indicate that the querying should start from the context node, document.body. If the "." was left out (leaving //h2) the query would start from the root node (html) which would be more wasteful.)

See Introduction to using XPath in JavaScript for more information.

Notes

• XPath expressions can be evaluated on HTML and XML documents.
• While using document.evaluate() works in FF2, in FF3 one must use someXMLDoc.evaluate() if evaluating against something other than the current document.

Result types

(Merge with Template:XPathResultConstants?

These are supported values for the resultType parameter of the evaluate method:

Results of NODE_ITERATOR types contain references to nodes in the document. Modifying a node will invalidate the iterator. After modifying a node, attempting to iterate through the results will result in an error.

Results of NODE_SNAPSHOT types are snapshots, which are essentially lists of matched nodes. You can make changes to the document by altering snapshot nodes. Modifying the document doesn't invalidate the snapshot; however, if the document is changed, the snapshot may not correspond to the current state of the document, since nodes may have moved, been changed, added, or removed.

Specifications

Browser compatibilityUpdate compatibility data on GitHub

See also

• Document.createExpression()
• XPathResult
• XPath Code Snippets
• Check for browser support