Using XPath in Firefox: Console Shortcuts, JavaScript API, and DevTools
Firefox supports XPath both in JavaScript and through its built-in DevTools features. The DevTools console provides a $x() function that evaluates XPath expressions against the current page, which is useful for testing selectors. The JavaScript document.evaluate() API is more verbose but offers several result types, such as snapshots for collecting all matches or single nodes for the first match. The Inspector can copy an element's shortest or full XPath, and the article notes that XPath handles parent traversal and text-based selection better than CSS, while CSS remains more readable for standard selectors. The guide also covers scraping structured data and using namespace resolvers for XML documents such as SVG.
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