Menu
Article Troubleshooting

xpath requests python

Narkw Brahma

Narkw Brahma

• 2 min read

XPath requests in Python

As a programmer who has extensively worked with web scraping and data extraction, I have often used XPath requests in Python to scrape data from HTML and XML documents. XPath is a query language used to navigate through an XML document, and it can also be used for parsing HTML documents. In Python, we can use the lxml library to make XPath requests.

How to use lxml library for XPath requests?

The first step is to install the lxml library using pip. You can use the following command:

!pip install lxml

Once the library is installed, we can start making XPath requests. The first step is to parse the HTML or XML document using the lxml.html.fromstring() or lxml.etree.parse() function, respectively.

from lxml import html

# Parsing HTML document
html_doc = '<html><body><h1>Hello World</h1></body></html>'
tree = html.fromstring(html_doc)

# Parsing XML document
xml_doc = '<root><element>value</element></root>'
root = etree.fromstring(xml_doc)

Once the document is parsed, we can start making XPath requests using the tree.xpath() or root.xpath() function.

How to make XPath requests in Python?

XPath requests are made using XPath expressions, which are used to select nodes from an XML or HTML document. Here are some examples of XPath expressions:

  • //h1 - selects all h1 elements in the document
  • //div[@class="content"] - selects all div elements with a class attribute equal to "content"
  • //a[contains(@href, "example.com")] - selects all a elements with an href attribute containing the string "example.com"

To make an XPath request in Python, we can use the tree.xpath() function, passing the XPath expression as a string. The function returns a list of Element objects, which represent the selected nodes.

// Selecting all h1 elements
titles = tree.xpath('//h1')
for title in titles:
    print(title.text)

In this example, we are selecting all h1 elements in the document and printing their text content. We can also select specific attributes of the selected nodes by appending the attribute name to the XPath expression.

// Selecting the href attribute of all a elements
links = tree.xpath('//a/@href')
for link in links:
    print(link)

In this example, we are selecting the href attribute of all a elements in the document and printing their values.

Conclusion

XPath requests are a powerful tool for web scraping and data extraction in Python. Using the lxml library, we can easily parse HTML and XML documents and make XPath requests to select the desired nodes. With XPath expressions, we can specify complex queries and extract specific data from the documents.

Share