Multiple XPaths

Each time you click on content in the web browser panel, Sequentum Cloud does some processing in the background to calculate the selection XPath. XPath is a common syntax for selecting in XML and HTML documents. Sequentum Cloud uses a standard implementation that supports XPath v1.0 syntax, and also supports a range of new methods specifically designed to make web data extraction easier. Sequentum Cloud has a range of tools that help you create a precise XPath, without the need to know the syntax. Eventually, you may find the need to fine-tune an XPath manually, and then you will need to learn the XPath syntax.

Each time you make a selection in the web browser, you can view the selection of XPath in the Selection panel (see the figure below).

Selection panel Screenshot.

The XPath in the figure above is:

CODE

//section[@class='content']

It contains these selection steps:

1.Selects all <section> tags within the webpage having the class attribute value content.

Read more in the XPath and Selection Techniques article. To learn more about XPath, we recommend that you consult a good reference guide such as this one.

https://www.w3schools.com/xml/xpath_syntax.asp

Multiple XPaths

A selection can consist of multiple XPaths, which is useful when extracting web content that may appear in different locations on a webpage. This allows for flexible data selection across various structures.

Selecting Multiple XPaths

You can specify multiple XPaths in two ways:

Manually enter each XPath separately by pressing Enter Key.
Use the Pipe symbol (|) to combine multiple XPaths.

Example 1: Enter XPaths Separately

Manually input each XPath into the Content Command by pressing Enter after each XPath:

CODE

//div[@class='pageContent']/div/div[1]/div/a
//div[@class='pageContent']/div/div[4]/div/a

This results in two selections on the webpage, highlighted in pink over the relevant text.

Enter XPaths separately by pressing Enter Key

Example 2: Use the Pipe Symbol (|)

Alternatively, you can combine multiple XPaths using the Pipe (|) symbol:

CODE

//div[@class='pageContent']/div/div[1]/div/a | //div[@class='pageContent']/div/div[2]/div/a

This also results in two selections, highlighted in pink.

**Pipe symbol (|) to combine multiple XPaths**

Multiple XPath expressions can be applied across all commands where XPath selection is applicable.