How to reverse expressions in XPath?

To reverse expression in XPath the not() function can be used which reverses any expression passed to it.

This is useful for creative negative predicates that are vital in many HTML parsing tasks. See this interactive example:

<!-- select only product data and ignore advertisements--> <article> <h1>Product Details:</h1> <div>price: 199</div> <div class="advertisement">Buy today?</div> <div>year: 2023</div> </article>

Above, we can use not() function to filter out special HTML elements like advertisements.

Question tagged: XPath

Related Posts

How to Parse XML

In this article, we'll explain about XML parsing. We'll start by defining XML files, their format and how to navigate them for data extraction.

Ultimate XPath Cheatsheet for HTML Parsing in Web Scraping

Ultimate companion for HTML parsing using XPath selectors. This cheatsheet contains all syntax explanations with interactive examples.

Web Scraping With Ruby

Introduction to web scraping with Ruby. How to handle http connections, parse html files for data, best practices, tips and an example project.