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Software and Programming

XPath-inking

What’s the difference between just bookmarking a resource and posting it to your blog? I suspect it’s the pointless and private gloating it inspires.

So, I was messing around with using XPath to scrape web pages, and since it’s an obtuse syntax (regular expressions for XML, more or less) and the tutorials aren’t that great, I thought it would be cool if there was some tool that would let you play around and interactively apply XPath expressions to web pages. Yes, that would be nice. It would probably be called something like XPath Explorer, wouldn’t it? So I asked the internets and it was so.

Then I thought, wouldn’t it be better if there was something that showed you how the XPath expression applied to the rendered web page you were looking at? Perhaps something that integrated directly into Firefox?

Yes, said the internet. That would be nice.

And so it was.