Off the Beaten XPath

Web Scraping in Python

Thomas Laetsch

Data Scientist, NYU

(At)tribute

• @ represents "attribute"
  • @class
  • @id
  • @href

Brackets and Attributes

Brackets and Attributes

xpath = '//p[@class="class-1"]'

Brackets and Attributes

xpath = '//*[@id="uid"]'

Brackets and Attributes

xpath = '//div[@id="uid"]/p[2]'

Content with Contains

Xpath Contains Notation:

contains( @attri-name, "string-expr" )

Contain This

xpath = '//*[contains(@class,"class-1")]'

Contain This

xpath = '//*[@class="class-1"]'

Get Classy

xpath = '/html/body/div/p[2]'

Get Classy

xpath = '/html/body/div/p[2]/@class'

End of the Path

Web Scraping in Python