XPath

Web Scraping

Definition

XPath (XML Path Language) is a query language for selecting nodes from an XML or HTML document. It provides a more powerful and flexible way to navigate document trees than CSS selectors alone.

How It Relates to CrawlForge

XPath expressions can navigate up, down, and across the document tree, making them useful for complex extraction scenarios. For example, you can select a price element based on its sibling text content -- something CSS selectors cannot do.

CrawlForge supports XPath alongside CSS selectors in its extraction tools. XPath is particularly valuable when scraping legacy sites with poorly structured HTML or when you need to extract data based on text content rather than class names.

Related CrawlForge Tools

Related Terms

CSS Selector

A CSS selector is a pattern used to select and target specific HTML elements on a web page. In web scraping, selectors identify exactly which data to extract from a page's structure.

DOM Parsing

DOM parsing is the process of converting raw HTML into a structured Document Object Model tree. This tree representation allows programs to navigate and extract specific elements from a web page.

HTML Parsing

HTML parsing is the process of analyzing HTML markup to extract its structure and content. Parsers convert raw HTML strings into navigable tree structures that programs can query and manipulate.

Structured Data

Structured data is information organized in a predefined format that makes it easy for machines to parse and understand. On the web, it typically refers to schema.org markup embedded in HTML pages.

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