# The Standalone XPath API

Because JAXP 1.3 is not available as a standard component of JDK 1.4, Saxon also provides a standalone XPath API of its own, with no dependencies on the JAXP 1.3 classes. This is available in the package `net.sf.saxon.sxpath`, which is included in the standard JAR file: `saxon8.jar` or `saxon8sa.jar`. It is a simpler API with less capability than the JAXP API, for example it does not allow XPath expressions to contain references to external variables or user-defined functions.

This interface consists essentially of two classes. The `XPathEvaluator` class can be used to establish a static context for compiling an XPath expression, and provides a method `compileExpression` that takes an XPath expression as a string, and returns an object of class `XPathExpression`. The XPathExpression object can then be evaluated using its `evaluate()` method. This method takes as an argument an object of class `Source` to represent the document against which the expression is evaluated. This can be a document that has already been parsed and built as a tree structure (represented, for example, by a `DOMSource` object or by a Saxon `NodeInfo`, or it can be an unparsed XML document supplied as a `StreamSource` or a `SAXSource`. The result of the expression is returned as a Java `List`, which may contain a mixture of nodes and atomic values. Nodes are represented using the class `NodeInfo`, unless the source used a different object model in which case they are returned using the node classes of that object model. Atomic values are represented using the appropriate Java class, for example `Double`, `Boolean`, or `String`.

Further details of these classes are available in the JavaDoc documentation.

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