What is XPath? | XML Path Language | XPath query language for select nodes in XML Documents

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XPath (short for XML Path Language) is a query language used to navigate through and select nodes in XML documents. It allows you to write expressions to find, filter, and extract parts of an XML document, similar to how SQL is used for databases or how CSS selectors are used for HTML.

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✅ What is XPath used for?

• Extracting specific data from XML (or HTML).

• Navigating through elements and attributes in an XML structure.

• Used in many technologies:

  • XSLT (transformations),

  • XML parsers,

  • Web scraping tools (e.g., Selenium, Scrapy, etc.),

  • Testing frameworks for locating elements on a webpage.

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🔧 Basic Syntax Examples

Given this XML:

<bookstore>
  <book category="children">
    <title lang="en">Harry Potter</title>
    <author>J.K. Rowling</author>
    <year>2005</year>
  </book>
  <book category="web">
    <title lang="en">Learning XML</title>
    <author>Erik T. Ray</author>
    <year>2003</year>
  </book>
</bookstore>

Examples of XPath expressions:

XPath Expression	What it selects
/bookstore/book	All <book> elements under <bookstore>
//title	All <title> elements anywhere in the document
//book[1]	The first <book> element
//book[@category='web']	All <book> elements with a category="web" attribute
//title[@lang='en']	All <title> elements with a lang="en" attribute
//book[year>2004]	All books published after 2004

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📘 Key Concepts

• / : Selects from the root node

• // : Selects nodes anywhere in the document

• @ : Selects attributes

• [] : Used to apply conditions/predicates

• * : Wildcard to match any element

• text() : Selects text inside a node

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If you're using tools like Selenium, XPath is one way to locate elements:

driver.find_element_by_xpath("//button[@id='submit']")