How to get absolute path of an html element

Question

String html = Jsoup.connect(url).timeout(1000*1000).get().html();
Document doc = Jsoup.parse(html);
Elements H2 = doc.select("div h2");
for (Element e: H2) {
  //get absolute path of element e
}

It seems there's no way of doing that just using Jsoup. If not, any other java package help achieve it?

If you want I can tell you how to do it in javascript, but that might not help you ? — Tom, Aug 03 '12 at 08:10

HashimR · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-03T08:17:56.707

2

Jsoup still doesn't have support for getting Xpath directly from element.

There is still a pending implementation suggestion.

edited Aug 03 '12 at 08:17

answered Aug 03 '12 at 08:11

HashimR

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This link moreover talks about implementation suggestion. – UVM Aug 03 '12 at 08:16

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:33

1

There are solutions for this problem.

Once upon a time I provided this answer:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/4747858/36305

edited May 23 '17 at 10:33

Community

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answered Aug 03 '12 at 12:54

Dimitre Novatchev

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UVM · Answer 3 · 2012-08-03T08:17:51.570

0

The following link explains how to apply XPATH in jsoup

jsoup: Java HTML Parser

And at the end of this article the author has its comments:

"If you like to extract specific data from the HTML, then Jsoup is the way to go."

edited Aug 03 '12 at 08:17

answered Aug 03 '12 at 08:08

UVM

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 03 '12 at 10:59

There is no such thing as "the" absolute path for an element. There are many different paths that will select an element. Examples of such paths that people sometimes ask for are:

/a/b/c/d
/a[1]/b[2]/c[3]/d[4]
/*[1]/*[2]/*[3]/*[4]

the problem with the first two cases is that they don't work if there are namespaces involved. The third path solves that problem but the path isn't as informative as people would sometimes like. If you want a path that is both informative and independent of the namespace context then you need something that uses predicates of the form *[local-name()='a' and namespace-uri()='......'].

It's the difficulty with namespaces that means you don't find many library routines that return the path to an element.

How to get absolute path of an html element

4 Answers4

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