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 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.