I am using BeautifulSoup to scrape a url and I had the following code

import urllib
import urllib2
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

url =  "http://www.example.com/servlet/av/ResultTemplate=AVResult.html"
req = urllib2.Request(url)
response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
the_page = response.read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(the_page)
soup.findAll('td',attrs={'class':'empformbody'})

Now in the above code we can use findAll to get tags and information related to them, but I want to use xpath. Is it possible to use xpath with BeautifulSoup? If possible, can anyone please provide me an example code so that it will be more helpful?

Nope, BeautifulSoup, by itself, does not support XPath expressions.

An alternative library, lxml, does support XPath 1.0. It has a BeautifulSoup compatible mode where it’ll try and parse broken HTML the way Soup does. However, the default lxml HTML parser does just as good a job of parsing broken HTML, and I believe is faster.

Once you’ve parsed your document into an lxml tree, you can use the .xpath() method to search for elements.

try:
    # Python 2
    from urllib2 import urlopen
except ImportError:
    from urllib.request import urlopen
from lxml import etree

url =  "http://www.example.com/servlet/av/ResultTemplate=AVResult.html"
response = urlopen(url)
htmlparser = etree.HTMLParser()
tree = etree.parse(response, htmlparser)
tree.xpath(xpathselector)

There is also a dedicated lxml.html() module with additional functionality.

Note that in the above example I passed the response object directly to lxml, as having the parser read directly from the stream is more efficient than reading the response into a large string first. To do the same with the requests library, you want to set stream=True and pass in the response.raw object after enabling transparent transport decompression:

import lxml.html
import requests

url =  "http://www.example.com/servlet/av/ResultTemplate=AVResult.html"
response = requests.get(url, stream=True)
response.raw.decode_content = True
tree = lxml.html.parse(response.raw)

Of possible interest to you is the CSS Selector support; the CSSSelector class translates CSS statements into XPath expressions, making your search for td.empformbody that much easier:

from lxml.cssselect import CSSSelector

td_empformbody = CSSSelector('td.empformbody')
for elem in td_empformbody(tree):
    # Do something with these table cells.

Coming full circle: BeautifulSoup itself does have very complete CSS selector support:

for cell in soup.select('table#foobar td.empformbody'):
    # Do something with these table cells.

I can confirm that there is no XPath support within Beautiful Soup.

As others have said, BeautifulSoup doesn’t have xpath support. There are probably a number of ways to get something from an xpath, including using Selenium. However, here’s a solution that works in either Python 2 or 3:

from lxml import html
import requests

page = requests.get('http://econpy.pythonanywhere.com/ex/001.html')
tree = html.fromstring(page.content)
#This will create a list of buyers:
buyers = tree.xpath('//div[@title="buyer-name"]/text()')
#This will create a list of prices
prices = tree.xpath('//span[@class="item-price"]/text()')

print('Buyers: ', buyers)
print('Prices: ', prices)

I used this as a reference.

BeautifulSoup has a function named findNext from current element directed childern,so:

father.findNext('div',{'class':'class_value'}).findNext('div',{'id':'id_value'}).findAll('a') 

Above code can imitate the following xpath:

div[class=class_value]/div[id=id_value]

I’ve searched through their docs and it seems there is not xpath option. Also, as you can see here on a similar question on SO, the OP is asking for a translation from xpath to BeautifulSoup, so my conclusion would be – no, there is no xpath parsing available.

when you use lxml all simple:

tree = lxml.html.fromstring(html)
i_need_element = tree.xpath('//a[@class="shared-components"]/@href')

but when use BeautifulSoup BS4 all simple too:

• first remove “//” and “@”
• second – add star before “=”

try this magic:

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "lxml")
i_need_element = soup.select ('a[class*="shared-components"]')

as you see, this does not support sub-tag, so i remove “/@href” part

Maybe you can try the following without XPath

from simplified_scrapy.simplified_doc import SimplifiedDoc 
html = '''
<html>
<body>
<div>
    <h1>Example Domain</h1>
    <p>This domain is for use in illustrative examples in documents. You may use this
    domain in literature without prior coordination or asking for permission.</p>
    <p><a href="https://www.iana.org/domains/example">More information...</a></p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
'''
# What XPath can do, so can it
doc = SimplifiedDoc(html)
# The result is the same as doc.getElementByTag('body').getElementByTag('div').getElementByTag('h1').text
print (doc.body.div.h1.text)
print (doc.div.h1.text)
print (doc.h1.text) # Shorter paths will be faster
print (doc.div.getChildren())
print (doc.div.getChildren('p'))

from lxml import etree
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(open('path of your localfile.html'),'html.parser')
dom = etree.HTML(str(soup))
print dom.xpath('//*[@id="BGINP01_S1"]/section/div/font/text()')

Above used the combination of Soup object with lxml and one can extract the value using xpath

This is a pretty old thread, but there is a work-around solution now, which may not have been in BeautifulSoup at the time.

Here is an example of what I did. I use the “requests” module to read an RSS feed and get its text content in a variable called “rss_text”. With that, I run it thru BeautifulSoup, search for the xpath /rss/channel/title, and retrieve its contents. It’s not exactly XPath in all its glory (wildcards, multiple paths, etc.), but if you just have a basic path you want to locate, this works.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
rss_obj = BeautifulSoup(rss_text, 'xml')
cls.title = rss_obj.rss.channel.title.get_text()