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.
To select elements by element ID using XPath we can match the @id
attribute with the =
operator or the contains()
function.
For example, to select <a id="home"></a>
element we could use //a[@id="home"]
or //a[contains(@id, "home")]
selectors as seen in these interactive examples:
For dynamic IDs we can use contains()
to match elements by partial ID:
Note that by CSS design there should only be one element of a given ID on the page which makes selecting elements by ID a very fast and reliable method.
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