About XPath
XPath is a way to locate elements on a web page – like CSS selectors, but more suitable in some cases. I use it selectors for web page scraping and testing.
Useful XPath selectors
Here is the list of XPath selector examples very useful for me:
Take last child
book/author[last()]
Search element by ID
[@id="availabilityTable"]
Search elements by class name
[@class="ADTprice"]
e.g.
//*[@id="availabilityTable"]/span[@class="ADTprice"]
Note! If target element has many classes, then you should use more complex syntax
//*div[contains(concat(" ",normalize-space(@class)," ")," popIndexValidation ")]/a
Search by name attribute
input[@name="prices"]
Find elements, which have attribute
//*[@foo]
Logic AND in criteria
//input[@name='Sport' and ./author/text()='James Small']
Logic OR in criteria
//input[@type="input" or @type="email" or @type="password"]
Logic NOT in criteria
//a[not(contains(@id, 'xx'))]
Find descendant element with class
//*[@id="HEADING_GROUP"]/descendant::b[@class="rank"]
Find neighbor
<span> </span> <a> 1 </a>
This selector
span/following-sibling::a
Will return <a> tag closes with <span> tag
Get element text except descendant’s text
<p>
123
<span>
456
</span>
</p>
This selector
p/text()[1]
Will return 123
Find element by inner text
span[contains(text(),"Breakfast Included")]
How to get the XPath selector?
Open target web page in Google Chrome browser and press F12 button, you will see Developer Tools Panel
Press “Select element” button
Move your mouse pointer to the target web page element (it will be highlighted by blue color) and click on it. The element markup will be highlighted in the developer tools panel
Right click on the target element’s markup, and in the menu, select Copy -> Copy XPath
That is it!