XPath Cheatsheet - XML/HTML Selector Syntax Reference

Regex is the wrong tool for pulling nodes out of XML/HTML — XPath was built for it. This reference covers node paths, predicate filters, axis navigation, string/functions and wildcards, with the scraping cases you actually meet. Use it when scraping a page, querying an XML config or asserting in tests, instead of writing fragile regex that breaks on whitespace. After reading you write a selector that targets exactly the node you want, including positions and attributes.

Dev Tools·34 commands·Last updated 2026-07-21

Basic Paths 7

/

Select from the root node

//

Select from anywhere (recursive)

.

Current node

..

Parent node

/bookstore/book

book child of bookstore under root

//book

All book elements in the document

book/title

title child of book

Predicate Filtering 6

//book[1]

First book

//book[last()]

Last book

//book[position()<3]

First two books

//book[@lang="zh"]

book whose lang attribute is zh

//book[price>35]

book with price > 35

//book[title]

book containing a title child

Axes 7

ancestor::div

All ancestor div

parent::node()

Parent node

child::title

Child node title

descendant::p

All descendant p

following-sibling::div

Following sibling div

preceding-sibling::h2

Preceding sibling h2

self::a

Self (only if it is a)

Common Functions 8

contains(@class, "active")

class attribute contains active

starts-with(text(), "Hello")

Text starts with Hello

normalize-space()

Trim leading/trailing and collapse inner whitespace

string-length(text())

Text length

count(//book)

Total number of book elements

concat("a", "-", "b")

Concatenate strings

substring("hello", 1, 3)

Substring

translate("abc", "abc", "ABC")

Character replacement

Wildcards & Operators 6

*

Match any element node

@*

Match any attribute

node()

Match any node type

//a | //b

Union of a and b

//div[@id="x" and @class="y"]

and condition

//div[@class="a" or @class="b"]

or condition

Tips

// is much slower than /; prefer exact paths for large documents.
contains(@class, 'x') matches composite classes like 'x y', more practical than exact match.
XPath 1.0 has no regex; for regex matching use XPath 2.0 or combine with contains.

Official References

Each command links to its official documentation below, so you can verify the latest usage and read deeper.

MDN XPath Docs

Maintained by LaoHand

Publicly updated on Jul 21, 2026, continuously proofread against official docs.

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