How To Get Xpath From Html

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In this tutorial, we will learn how to extract XPath from an HTML document. XPath (XML Path Language) is a powerful query language for selecting nodes from an XML document, which can also be used in HTML documents.

Extracting XPath from an HTML document can be helpful for web scraping, testing, or automating tasks where you need to interact with specific elements on a webpage.

1. Using Browser Developer Tools

Modern web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari come with built-in developer tools that allow users to find the XPath of given elements easily. Here’s how to do it in Chrome:

  1. Right-click on the element you want to find the XPath for and select Inspect or Inspect Element.
  2. In the Elements tab of the Developer Tools, the selected element will be highlighted. Right-click on the highlighted HTML code, then hover over Copy and click on Copy XPath.

Now, the XPath of the selected element is copied to your clipboard and can be pasted wherever needed.

2. Using Python and lxml

Python’s lxml library provides a simple way to extract XPath from HTML. To use lxml, you first need to install it:

pip install lxml

Here’s a simple example of extracting the XPath of an element using Python and lxml:

from lxml import html

sample_html = """



    <title>Sample HTML</title>


    <h1>Hello World!</h1>
    <p>This is a sample HTML document with a link to <a href="https://www.example.com">Example</a></p>


"""

# Parse the HTML document
parsed_html = html.fromstring(sample_html)

# Get the xpath of the first <a> element
link_xpath = parsed_html.getpath(parsed_html.find('.//a'))

print("XPath of the link:", link_xpath)

This script will output:

XPath of the link: /html/body/p/a

Now you know how to get XPath from an HTML document using browser developer tools and Python’s lxml library. These methods will help you interact with web elements easily and automate your tasks more effectively.

Happy coding!