A simple example to get us started is to use the API to bring in the title from a DocBook article. A DocBook article title looks like this:

<article>
 <artheader>
  <title>XPathScript - A Viable Alternative to XSLT?</title>
  ...

The XPath expression to retrieve the text in the <title> element is:

/article/artheader/title/text( )

Putting all this together to make this text into the HTML title, we get the following XPathScript stylesheet:

<html>
<head>
 <title><%= findvalue("/article/artheader/title") %></title>
</head>
<body>
  This was a DocBook Article. 
  We're only extracting the title for now!
<p>
The title was: <%= findvalue("/article/artheader/title") %>
</body>
</html>

Again, we see the XPath syntax being used to find the nodes in the document, along with the function findvalue( ). Similarly, a list of nodes can be extracted (and thus looped over) using the findnodes( ) function:

...
<%
for my $sect1 (findnodes("/article/sect1")) {
  print $sect1->findvalue("title"), "<br>\n";
  for my $sect2 ($sect1->findnodes("sect2")) {
    print " + ", $sect2->findvalue("title"), "<br>\n";
    for my $sect3 ($sect2->findnodes("sect3")) {
      print " + + ", $sect3->findvalue("title"), "<br>\n";
    }
  }
}
%>
...

Here we see how we can apply the find* functions to individual nodes as methods, which makes the node the context node to search from. That is, $node->findnodes("title") finds <title> child nodes of $node.