Home/ Questions/Q 6081611
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-23T11:11:44+00:00

How do you quickly locate element/elements via xpath string on a given org.w3c.dom.document? there

  • 0

How do you quickly locate element/elements via xpath string on a given org.w3c.dom.document? there seems to be no FindElementsByXpath() method. For example

/html/body/p/div[3]/a

I found that recursively iterating through all the child node levels to be quite slow when there are lot of elements of same name. Any suggestions?

I cannot use any parser or library, must work with w3c dom document only.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Try this:

    //obtain Document somehow, doesn't matter how
DocumentBuilder b = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder();
org.w3c.dom.Document doc = b.parse(new FileInputStream("page.html"));

//Evaluate XPath against Document itself
XPath xPath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();
NodeList nodes = (NodeList)xPath.evaluate("/html/body/p/div[3]/a",
        doc, XPathConstants.NODESET);
for (int i = 0; i < nodes.getLength(); ++i) {
    Element e = (Element) nodes.item(i);
}

    With the following page.html file:

    <html>
  <head>
  </head>
  <body>
  <p>
    <div></div>
    <div></div>
    <div><a>link</a></div>
  </p>
  </body>
</html>
    • 0