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.
To select elements by class using XPath we can match the @class
attribute using contains()
function or the =
operator.
For example, to select <a class="link"></a>
we could use //a[@class="link"]
or //a[contains(@class, "link")]
selectors. See this interactive example:
Note that using contains()
might match partial matches. For example, disabled-link
would be matched by our contains(@class, "link")
selector.
To match by a single class we can use contains(concat(" ", normalize-space(@class), " "), " match ")
pattern:
Tip: If you're using Python's parsel
package then there's an equivalent shortcut has-class()
. For example, //a[has-class("link")]