6.6.5.5 order by Clause

As described in 6.6.3.5 Ordering Specifier, it may be desirable to sort the result of an XPath query into either ascending or descending order based on the value of a property. This is done by adding the order by clause to a location path expression. The additions to the syntax of the XPath location clause are as follows:

For example, the query to find all nodes of type car where the color is “green” and sort them by price in ascending order, the following query might be used:

//element(*, car)[@brand='green'] order by @price ascending

Note that if neither ascending nor descending are explicitly specified the default behavior is ascending.