Broccie,

When you say filter, do you mean that you want to select elements that meet
certain criteria, for example they all have attributes that match a certain
value?

You're certainly on the right track looking at XPath. XPath is one of the
foundation technologies of XML and the one best suited to solve your
problem. XPath will help you to select XML nodes from an XML document that
meet your filter criteria.

However, you need a vehicle to execute your XPath statements. You can do
this in a number of ways. Which one is thie best one for you depends on what
you are going to do with the results of the filtering.

You can execute the XPath statement either using a DOM based XML Parser such
as XMLDocument in MSXML and XmlDocument in the .NET Framework. The .NET
Framework also introduced a cursor based parser model with the XPathDocument
to select XML.

This approach is well suited if you need to run more code to work with the
results of your filtering.

If you are most interesting to transform the results into another XML format
or into HTML the you can also leverage XPath as a part of an XSL
transformation. However, XSL might be too much for you to tackle if you're
still new to XML at all.

Let me know if this helped clearing things up or if you have further
questions.