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 text using XPath we can either match the text()
value or use it in a contains()
function.
For example, to select <a>websites</a>
we would use //a[contains(text(), "website")]
selector. See this interactive example:
Note that contains()
method is case sensitive.
For case-insensitive selections we can use matches
(sometimes called re:test()
) function: