Selectors

We already know how to define any part of the HTML file you want. However, how can we extract the text using the XPaths? For this purpose, you can use the scrapy library to import Selector, which helps to select the data. Then create a selector object declaring the parameter text as the HTML file you want to work with:

from scrapy.selector import Selector

sel = Selector(text = html)

Here the first line imports needed packages, and the next one creates an object for work.

To get any part of the HTML file you want, just use the function .xpath() of the selector object and your path as the parameter:

The function returns the list of all title tags as selector objects, which could be inconvenient in use. To get any tag you want as a string, just specify the number of the list element and apply the function .extract():

Here we selected the first element of all initially extracted title tags and converted it to the string.

The BeautifulSoup doesn’t provide us with the functions to work with XPaths, like with CSS locators (which we will consider later). However, you should know how the XPaths work as it’s an extremely powerful tool, and a lot of other more common libraries for advanced web-scrappers have the tools to work with XPaths (like lxml library).