JS wrote:
> I am trying to learn XPath and would therefore like to be able to 
> execute various XPath statements on different XML files. I have heard 
> that the best way to do this is to find an XPath API for eg. java and 
> then write some small applications. So far I have been looking at:
> 
> 
> http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/xpath_apis.html
> 
> But are there any alternatives that should be considered?

I am not sure you need to write an application yourself. The jEdit 
editor for instance has an XSLT/XPath plugin that allows you to evaluate 
XPath expressions against an XML document. And I am sure that is just an 
example, there are certainly other tools already providing XPath evaluation.

As for alternatives, if you want to learn and use XPath 1.0 then I think 
the javax.xml.xpath API is fine but since 2007 we have XPath 2.0 (and 
XQuery 1.0 of which XPath 2.0 is a subset) so you could consider to use 
Saxon from http://saxon.sourceforge.net/ to use the more powerful XPath 
2.0 or XQuery 1.0 language.

-- 

	Martin Honnen
	http://msmvps.com/blogs/martin_honnen/