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copied!<p>Quick answer; yes, ../ and parent::* are equivalent but you get different results because your XPath expressions are different.</p> <p>Longer answer;</p> <p>The expressions parent::node() and .. are equivalent, the latter being an abbreviated form of the former according to the <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath" rel="nofollow noreferrer">W3C XPath Recommendation</a>.</p> <p>You will get similar behaviour from parent::*, because XML forms a tree, so any child can have at most one parent.</p> <p>The reason you will get different results is because they are different queries. The first has an extra * on the end (../../*), which is probably returning the child item sequence of your Node.</p> <p>The second gets specifically the parent of the parent of the context node (in abbreviated form ../..), which is your Node element of interest.</p> <p>Example:</p> <p>For the document</p> <pre><code><?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <root> <Node> <id type="image"> <id attr1="myVal"> </id> </id> </Node> </root> </code></pre> <p>The queries</p> <pre><code>//Node/id[@type='image']/id[@attr1='myVal']/../../* </code></pre> <p>and</p> <pre><code>//Node/id[@type='image']/id[@attr1='myVal']/parent::*/parent::*/* </code></pre> <p>return the node id[@type='image']</p> <p>Whereas the queries</p> <pre><code>//Node/id[@type='image']/id[@attr1='myVal']/../.. </code></pre> <p>and</p> <pre><code>//Node/id[@type='image']/id[@attr1='myVal']/parent::*/parent::* </code></pre> <p>return the node Node.</p>

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