XPath SelectNodes in .NET

Answer 1

Specifying .//C will achieve what you want, otherwise, the XPath starts from the document root rather than the current node.

The confusion is in the definition of // from the XPath standard as follows:

// is short for /descendant-or-self::node()/. For example, //para is short for /descendant-or-self::node()/child::para and so will select any para element in the document (even a para element that is a document element will be selected by //para since the document element node is a child of the root node); div//para is short for div/descendant-or-self::node()/child::para and so will select all para descendants of div children.

Because // is short for /descendant-or-self::node()/ it starts at the document level unless you specify a node at the start.