![]() HTML tree is made of nodes which can contain attributes such as classes, ids and text itself. Let's go a bit further and illustrate this: In this basic example of a simple web page, we can see that the document already resembles a data tree. ![]() ![]() Let's start off with a small example page and illustrate its structure: In other words, HTML follows a tree-like structure of nodes and their attributes, which we can easily navigate programmatically. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is designed to be easily machine-readable and parsable. Xpath is easily extendable with additional functionality.īefore we dig into Xpath let's have a quick overview of HTML itself and how it enables xpath language to find anything with the right instructions.Xpath can transform results before returning them.Xpath can traverse HTML trees in every direction and is location-aware. ![]() Other path languages you might know of are CSS selectors which usually describe paths for applying styles, or tool-specific languages like jq which describe paths for JSON-type documents.įor HTML parsing, Xpath has some advantages over CSS selectors: XPath stands for "XML Path Language" which essentially means it's a query language that described a path from point A to point B for XML/HTML type of documents. We'll start with a quick introduction and expression cheatsheet and explore concepts using an interactive XPath tester.įinally, we'll wrap up by covering XPath implementations in various programming languages and some common idioms and tips when it comes to XPath in web scraping. In this article, we'll be taking a deep look at this unique path language and how can it be used to extract needed details from modern, complex HTML documents. ![]()
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