Xpath

General
1

Greetings all ,

I been doing a fair bit codding the last several weeks and have delved into some need to learn and or utilize Xpath and having hard time coming up with good material on the subject for what I’m trying to do.

Wondering if anyone knows a good resource for learning and or applying this in Google Doc’s or suggest another format I should try using.

Basicly I’m trying to collect data info and display in spread sheet or need to dump it out to CSV to import to a data base.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Barry

2

I did a google search for ‘google docs xpath’ and found some examples and videos on webscraping using google docs and xpath. Is this the kind of thing you’re doing? I’ve done a bunch of xml parsing and modifications using xpath via the XML::LibXML module with Perl. There is also a scripting language for xpath called XSH that you can use to query and modify XML or HTML. Where are you stuck?

3

yea I didn’t come across to much really useful I can hit it some more prolly this weekend but trying to like query against a author pull titles and url for like paperback , ebook and audiobook all at the same time preferably

I’ve got like the titles working but Im not sure how to check against the others like one page I do get like ebook urls, but that’s all the other it seemed to work for like 15 seconds then it all blanked out and reports a parsing error.
found a old book on xpath 1, seems pretty dated and nothing on google version format

4

I learned a lot about XPath by using this Firefox plugin:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/xpath-checker/

There are similar plugins for Chrome as well.

And w3 has decent documentation:

http://www.w3schools.com/xpath/

~Dave