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.
The most popular package that implements XPath selectors in Python is lxml. We can use the xpath()
method to find all matching values:
from lxml import etree
tree = etree.fromstring("""
<div>
<a>link 1</a>
<a>link 2</a>
</div>
""")
for result in tree.xpath("//a"):
print(result.text)
"link 1"
"link 2"
However, in web scraping the recommended way is to use the parsel package. It's based on lxml
and providers a more consistent behavior when working with HTML content:
from parsel import Selector
selector = Selector("""
<div>
<a>link 1</a>
<a>link 2</a>
</div>
""")
selector.xpath("//a").getall()
['<a>link 1</a>', '<a>link 2</a>']