jQuery select element by XPath

Solution 1:

If you are debugging or similar - In chrome developer tools, you can simply use

$x('/html/.//div[@id="text"]')

Solution 2:

document.evaluate() (DOM Level 3 XPath) is supported in Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera - the only major browser missing is MSIE. Nevertheless, jQuery supports basic XPath expressions: http://docs.jquery.com/DOM/Traversing/Selectors#XPath_Selectors (moved into a plugin in the current jQuery version, see https://plugins.jquery.com/xpath/). It simply converts XPath expressions into equivalent CSS selectors however.

Solution 3:

First create an xpath selector function.

function _x(STR_XPATH) {
    var xresult = document.evaluate(STR_XPATH, document, null, XPathResult.ANY_TYPE, null);
    var xnodes = [];
    var xres;
    while (xres = xresult.iterateNext()) {
        xnodes.push(xres);
    }

    return xnodes;
}

To use the xpath selector with jquery, you can do like this:

$(_x('/html/.//div[@id="text"]')).attr('id', 'modified-text');

Hope this can help.