XPath Tester for XML

Test XPath expressions against your own XML data free online. See matched nodes and values instantly using the browser's native XPath engine. No signup needed.

XML Data

XPath

How to Use This Tool

Paste your XMLAdd the XML document you want to query

Write an XPath expressionTarget elements, attributes, or text content

Click TestSee every node your expression matches

XPath Is the Precision Tool for Navigating XML

An XML document with deeply nested elements and repeated structures can be hard to query with simple string searches. XPath was built specifically for this — it describes a path through the document's tree structure, letting you select exactly the nodes you need regardless of how the surrounding structure looks.

This tester runs your expression using the browser's native XPath evaluation engine, the same engine used internally by browsers for their own DOM operations, so results match what you would get running the same expression in a real scraping or processing script.

The Expressions Worth Knowing

//item selects every item element anywhere in the document. //item[@id='5'] narrows that down to a specific one by attribute. //item/name/text() drills into a child element and grabs its text content rather than the element wrapper. These three patterns alone cover a large share of practical XML extraction needs.

Where XPath Shows Up in Real Tools

Web scraping libraries like Scrapy and Selenium use XPath to locate elements on a page, since HTML can be parsed as an XML-like tree. RSS feed processors use it to extract article titles and links. Legacy enterprise systems that exchange data as XML rely on XPath for transformation rules. Testing your expression here first means fewer surprises when you deploy it in any of these contexts.

Frequently Asked Questions

XPath is a query language for navigating and selecting nodes in an XML document, similar to how CSS selectors target HTML elements. It is widely used in web scraping, XML data processing, and automated testing tools that need to locate specific elements.

Yes, since it uses the browser's built-in XPath evaluation engine, which implements the XPath 1.0 specification including axis selectors, predicates with conditions, and most standard functions like contains() and text().

Use a predicate like //item[@id='5'] to select an item element specifically where the id attribute equals 5. This is one of the most common XPath patterns for targeting a specific node among siblings.

A single slash like /root/item selects only direct children matching that exact path from the root. A double slash like //item selects an item element anywhere in the document regardless of how deeply nested it is.

Yes, appending /text() to an element path, like //title/text(), returns the text content inside that element rather than the element node itself, which is often what you actually want when extracting data.