How to use Xpath in A360 to navigate an HTML page

In this blog post, we will learn how to use Xpath in a360 to navigate an HTML page with example. Xpath is a powerful and flexible language that allows us to locate elements in an XML or HTML document using expressions. Xpath can be very useful for web scraping, automation testing, or data extraction tasks.

To use Xpath in a360, we need to follow these steps:

1. Open the a360 recorder and select the web browser that you want to use.

2. Navigate to the web page that you want to interact with and click on the Capture button.

3. Select the element that you want to capture and click on the Xpath option in the Capture window.

4. The Xpath expression for the selected element will be displayed in the Capture window. You can edit or modify the expression as needed.

5. Click on the Validate button to check if the Xpath expression is correct and returns the expected element.

6. Click on the Save button to save the captured element as a variable in your bot.

7. You can use the variable in your bot logic to perform actions on the element, such as clicking, typing, extracting text, etc.

Let's see an example of how to use Xpath in a360 to navigate an HTML page. Suppose we want to scrape some information from this blog post: https://scrapfly.io/blog/parsing-html-with-xpath/

We want to extract the title, author, date, and summary of the blog post using Xpath expressions. Here are the steps we need to follow:

1. Open the a360 recorder and select Chrome as the web browser.

2. Navigate to https://scrapfly.io/blog/parsing-html-with-xpath/ and click on the Capture button.

3. Select the title of the blog post and click on the Xpath option in the Capture window. The Xpath expression for the title is: //h1[@class='post-title']

4. Click on the Validate button to check if the Xpath expression is correct and returns the title of the blog post: Parsing HTML with Xpath

5. Click on the Save button and name the variable as title.

6. Repeat steps 3-5 for the author, date, and summary of the blog post using these Xpath expressions:

- Author: //span[@class='post-author']

- Date: //span[@class='post-date']

- Summary: //div[@class='post-summary']

7. Name the variables as author, date, and summary respectively.

8. Now we have four variables that contain the information we want to scrape from the blog post: title, author, date, and summary.

9. We can use these variables in our bot logic to display, store, or process them as needed.

That's how we can use Xpath in a360 to navigate an HTML page with example. Xpath is a very handy tool that can help us locate elements in any web page with ease and accuracy. We hope you found this blog post helpful and informative.