When web scraping, the most common way to navigate HTML data is to find elements by class name. For that, we can use CSS or XPath Selectors:
CSS selectors
- Use the
.classnotation, which will find any nodes that contain full class name:javascript`.some-class` will match: `<a class="some-class"></a>` `<a class="first some-class third"></a>` - Use the
[class*="<partial>"]notation which will find any nodes that contain a given string:javascript`[class*="some-class"]` will match: `<a class="some-class"></a>` `<a class="first some-class third"></a>`
Xpath selectors
Alternatively, XPath selectors can be used with similar functions:
//*[@class="link"]will find any element where the class is exactly equal to"link"//*[contains(@class, "link")]will find any element where class contains the string"link"