🚀 We are hiring! See open positions

How to reverse expressions in XPath?

by Bernardas Alisauskas May 29, 2023 1 min read

To reverse expression in XPath the not() function can be used which reverses any expression passed to it.

This is useful for creative negative predicates that are vital in many HTML parsing tasks. See this interactive example:

<!-- select only product data and ignore advertisements--> <article> <h1>Product Details:</h1> <div>price: 199</div> <div class="advertisement">Buy today?</div> <div>year: 2023</div> </article>

Above, we can use not() function to filter out special HTML elements like advertisements.

Scale Your Web Scraping
Anti-bot bypass, browser rendering, and rotating proxies — all in one API. Start with 1,000 free credits.
No credit card required 1,000 free API credits Anti-bot bypass included
Not ready? Get our newsletter instead.