[Answers](https://scrapfly.io/blog)   /  [data-parsing](https://scrapfly.io/blog/tag/data-parsing)   /  [How to use XPath selectors in Python?](https://scrapfly.io/blog/answers/how-to-use-xpath-selectors-in-python)   # How to use XPath selectors in Python?

 by [Bernardas Alisauskas](https://scrapfly.io/blog/author/bernardas) Oct 31, 2022 1 min read [\#data-parsing](https://scrapfly.io/blog/tag/data-parsing) [\#python](https://scrapfly.io/blog/tag/python) [\#xpath](https://scrapfly.io/blog/tag/xpath) 

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The most popular package that implements XPath selectors in Python is [lxml](https://pypi.org/project/lxml/). We can use the `xpath()` method to find all matching values:

python```python
from lxml import etree

tree = etree.fromstring("""
<div>
    <a>link 1</a>
    <a>link 2</a>
</div>
""")
for result in tree.xpath("//a"):
    print(result.text)
"link 1"
"link 2"
```



However, in web scraping the **recommended** way is to use the [parsel](https://pypi.org/project/parsel/) package. It's based on `lxml` and providers a more consistent behavior when working with HTML content:

python```python
from parsel import Selector

selector = Selector("""
<div>
    <a>link 1</a>
    <a>link 2</a>
</div>
""")

selector.xpath("//a").getall()
['<a>link 1</a>', '<a>link 2</a>']
```





 

    



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