A:

XPath is used to navigate through elements and attributes in an XML document. All the web pages are HTML documents in nature. You can write Xpath expressions to find any elements you want on the web page.

Sample XPath expressions:

//UL[@class='nav navbar-nav center-nav']

//*[@id=’gdp’]

Octoparse provides an XPath engine for HTML documents (mainly means web pages) so that we can use XPath to locate data on web page precisely. 

There are various kinds of tutorials and blogs about XPath on our website. See below:

XPath Introduction -- Use XPath to Scrape Web Data

XPath - Brief Introduction

Brief Intro to HTML Document

Getting started with XPath 1

Getting started with XPath 2

If you have any question, we'd happy to help.

Octoparse Support Team