Can I Use XPath with BeautifulSoup?

Using XPath with BeautifulSoup: A Tale of Two Libraries

The popular BeautifulSoup library provides convenient methods for parsing HTML and scraping data. However, it natively lacks XPath capabilities, despite its wide use in web scraping.

To utilize XPath expressions, consider adopting lxml, an alternative library that offers BeautifulSoup compatibility and full XPath 1.0 support. Here's how to employ XPath with lxml:

from lxml import etree

# Parse HTML
tree = etree.parse(response, etree.HTMLParser())

# Search using XPath
results = tree.xpath(xpathselector)

If you prefer to avoid external dependencies, BeautifulSoup offers CSS selector support. This allows for more concise searches by translating CSS statements into XPath expressions:

for cell in soup.select('table#foobar td.empformbody'):
    # Perform desired operations on table cells

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