How to find elements by XPath in Puppeteer?

XPath selectors are one of the most popular ways to parse HTML pages when web scraping. In NodeJS and Puppeteer, XPath selectors can be used through the page.$x method:

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

async function run() {
    const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
    const page = await browser.newPage();
    await page.goto("https://httpbin.dev/html");

    // this will always return all found matches as array:
    let elements = await page.$x("//p");

    // to get element details we need to use the evaluate method
    // for text:
    let firstText = await elements[0].evaluate(element => element.textContent);
    console.log(firstText);

    // for other attributes:
    await page.goto("https://httpbin.dev/links/10/1");
    let linkElements = await page.$x("//a");
    let firstLink = await linkElements[0].evaluate(element => element.href);
    console.log(firstLink);

    browser.close();
}

run();

⚠ It's possible that this command will try to find elements before the page has fully loaded if it's a dynamic javascript page. For more see How to wait for a page to load in Puppeteer?

Also see: How to find elements by CSS selector in Puppeteer?

Question tagged: Puppeteer, Headless Browsers, Data Parsing, XPath

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