How to select first element via XPath?

by

Any of these XPath expressions will select the first a element:

  • (//a)[1] selects first a in the whole document.
  • (/div/ul/li/figure/a)[1] selects first a with shown heritage.
  • (//div[@class="carousel"]/ul/li/figure/a)[1] restricts heritage.
  • (//div[@class="carousel"]//a)[1] abstracts away some heritage.

Choose depending upon the context of your shown XML in your actual document and whether you wish to restrict the a elements to only those under certain other elements.

Common Mistake

Note that //a[1] actually selects multiple a elements:

<a id="one"/>
<a id="two"/>

because //a[1] means select the a elements that are the first child of its parent.

You must use parentheses (//a)[1] to select

<a id="two"/>

alone as the first a in the document.

More Related Contents:

  1. Testing text() nodes vs string values in XPath
  2. How can I find an element by CSS class with XPath?
  3. XPath to match @class value and element value?
  4. How to use XPath contains() for specific text?
  5. XPath testing that string ends with substring?
  6. Why is XPath contains(text(),’substring’) not working as expected?
  7. Why are bullets not appearing on posts? [closed]
  8. Can you provide some examples of why it is hard to parse XML and HTML with a regex? [closed]
  9. Scraping html tables into R data frames using the XML package
  10. Create HTML Table with SQL FOR XML
  11. Why does my XPath query (scraping HTML tables) only work in Firebug, but not the application I’m developing?
  12. How to avoid joining all text from Nodes when scraping
  13. How do I escape ampersands in XML so they are rendered as entities in HTML?
  14. Selecting a css class with xpath
  15. Case insensitive XPath contains() possible?
  16. html parsing of cricinfo scorecards
  17. How to calculate the XPath position of an element using Javascript?
  18. How To Auto-Format / Indent XML/HTML in Notepad++
  19. Converting HTML to XML
  20. Space Before Closing Slash?
  21. White space inside XML/HTML tags
  22. Valid content-type for XML, HTML and XHTML documents
  23. Is it possible to have HTML text or CDATA inside an XML attribute?
  24. Is it possible to insert HTML content in XML document?
  25. XPath:: Get following Sibling
  26. Is whitespace allowed within XML/HTML tags?
  27. How to handle xml/html in git feature branch workflow?
  28. Line Break in XML? [duplicate]
  29. What is the performance impact of the universal selector?
  30. Place boxes inside ul in center, but align them left

Leave a Comment