XPath Expression
An XPath expression is a query language used to navigate, select, and extract specific nodes or data from an XML or HTML document. XPath provides a powerful and flexible way to traverse the document’s structure and retrieve information based on various criteria. XPath expressions can be used in various programming languages and tools to work with XML data.
Here are some examples of XPath expressions:
- Select all
<book>elements in the document:
//book- Select the value of the “title” attribute of the first
<book>element:
//book[1]/@title- Select all
<book>elements that have a “category” attribute with the value “fiction”:
//book[@category='fiction']- Select the text content of all
<title>elements under a<book>element:
//book/title/text()- Select the text content of the first
<title>element under the first<book>element:
//book[1]/title[1]/text()- Select all
<book>elements that have a child element<price>with a value greater than 20:
//book[price > 20]- Select all
<book>elements that have a child element<title>containing the text “Harry Potter”:
//book[contains(title, 'Harry Potter')]- Select the first
<book>element that has a “category” attribute with the value “fantasy” and a “lang” attribute with the value “en”:
//book[@category='fantasy' and @lang='en'][1]XPath expressions are versatile and allow for complex querying and data extraction from XML or HTML documents. They are widely used in various contexts, such as web scraping, data processing, XML manipulation, and more. XPath expressions can be utilized directly in browser developer tools, programming languages (e.g., Python, Java), XML parsing libraries, and XPath evaluation tools.