Probably most people would have thought of it. You wouldn't make that same comparison with regular expressions(tool) and a text document(data) would you? As in

Probably most people would have thought of it. You wouldn't make that same comparison with regular expressions(tool) and a text document(data) would you? As in, the tool is not part and parcel of the data. XPath(and JSONPath) are powerful tools for programatically pulling data from complex data structures.