An XPath selector is an XPath expression used to choose nodes from an XML or HTML document. A crawler can use it to extract text, attributes, or groups of elements such as product cards or article links.
Make the selector match the page’s structure
Use stable attributes and relationships instead of counting nested div elements. For example, select a card by a known class and then find its title within that card, rather than querying every title on the page and hoping order stays fixed.
Check whether the selector returns zero, one, or many results, and handle each case deliberately. A zero result may mean the page changed, the wrong response was parsed, or the content is loaded later with JavaScript. Inspect the raw response before rewriting the selector.
Different libraries expose XPath results in different forms. Read the framework’s documentation and test a saved response sample before running at scale.
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