Use of count in Xpath expressions

Answer 1

restaurant/tables/count(table)

This expression is only legal in XPath 2.0. It produces a sequence of numbers and this sequence may have length greater than one if the XML document has more than one restorant or restorant/tables elements.

count(restaurant/tables/table)

This expression is valid both in XPath 1.0 and XPath 2.0. It produces a single number.

So, in general, the two expressions are different, only the second is legal in XPath 1.0 and in XPath 2.0 these expressions may produce different results, depending on the XML document against which they are evaluated.

However on the specified XML document, these two expressions (when evaluated in XPath 2.0) produce the same result:

3

Answer 2

Check out this Microsoft XPath count() tutorial.

count(/restaurant/tables/table)

will count the table elements in the above path.