Getting started with xpath Finding elements containing specific text Namespaces Select nodes with names equal to or containing some string Find nodes that have a specific attribute Get the count of nodes Location paths and axes Finding elements containing specific attributes Get nodes relative to the current node Select nodes based on their children Check if a node is present Check if a node's text is empty

Getting started with xpath

Remarks:

XPath is a language for addressing parts of an XML document.

It is used in XSLT and is a subset of XQuery. Libraries are available for most other programming languages as well.

XPath is an international standard with specifications published by W3C:

XPath 1.0: XML Path Language (XPath), Version 1.0
XPath 2.0: XML Path Language (XPath) 2.0 (Second Edition)
XPath 3.0: XML Path Language (XPath) 3.0

Additional Info:

Version	Release Date
1.0	1999-12-16
2.0	2007-01-23
3.0	2014-04-08
3.1 (W3C Candidate Recommendation)	2015-12-17

Sample XML (without namespaces)

Here is some sample XML against which example XPaths can be written:

<r>
  <e a="1"/>
  <f a="2" b="1">Text 1</f>
  <f/>
  <g>
    <i c="2">Text 2</i>
    Text 3
    <j>Text 4</j>
  </g>
</r>

Select text

For the sample XML (without namespaces):

This XPath,

/r/f/text()

will select the text node with this string value:

"Text 1"

And this XPath,

string(/r/f)

will return the string value of f, which is also:

"Text 1"

Select an element

For the sample XML (without namespaces):

This XPath,

/r/e

will select this element:

<e a="1"/>

Common HTML Operations

If the input HTML DOM is

<html>
    <body>
        <a>link</a>
        <div class='container' id='divone'>
            <p class='common' id='enclosedone'>Element One</p>
            <p class='common' id='enclosedtwo'>Element Two</p>
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

Find an element with a specific id in the entire page

//*[@id='divone'] # Returns <div class='container' id='divone'>

Find an element with a specific id in a particular path

/html/body/div/p[@id='enclosedone'] # Returns <p class='common' id='enclosedone'>Element One</p>

Select an element with a particular id & class

//p[@id='enclosedone' and @class='common'] # Returns <p class='common' id='enclosedone'>Element One</p>

Select the text of a particular element

//*[@id='enclosedone']/text() # Returns Element One

Testing Xpaths in browser console

A quick way to test your xpath is in your browser developer tool console.

Format is

   $x('//insert xpath here')

$ - specifies it is a selector.

x - specifies it is using xpaths

Example:

$x("//button[text() ='Submit']")

When this command is entered it will return all occurrences of elements that are buttons with text equal to Submit.

Contributors

Topic Id: 883

Example Ids: 3229,3231,3232,22681,31002

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