“++,” and, without question, this is how I would recommend doing it.

The overwhelming-advantage of XPath is that it lets you describe, in nothing more than a simple text-string, what you want.   It’s up to the XPath engine to figure out how to do it.   The example shown performs many searches and there’s not a drop of “how” code in it.   You want such an approach, that lets you be very “what if...?” in what you search-for and subsequently plot without writing code.