In OPC Classic, the slash at the beginning of the browse path denotes an absolute path that starts from the root of the OPC address space. The string form of a browse path is a concept on the client side (OPC Studio), and does not appear in OPC specifications.
A browse path can be represented by a string; in such case, it can express either a relative or absolute browse path (the BrowsePath object cannot hold relative browse paths).
As mentioned above, the format of the browse path string is such that the individual node names are separated by slashes (“/”). The slash at the beginning of the browse path denotes an absolute path that starts from the root of the OPC address space. In addition, ‘.’ denotes a current level, and ‘..’ denotes a parent level, similarly to the conventions used in Windows file system.
Because the node names can contain any characters, we need to consider situations in which the node name itself contains a slash (‘/’) or a dot (‘.’). In such case, in the string format of browse paths, these characters are escaped by preceding them with an ampersand (‘&’). An ampersand itself needs to be escaped, too.