Mechanize is a library that provides stateful programmatic web browsing in Python. It is largely used for automating interaction with websites, such as submitting forms or scraping content from web pages. It is important to note that Mechanize is inspired by Perl's Mechanize, with similar functionality.
Python's Mechanize library does not natively support XPath selectors. It primarily supports finding links and forms using regular expressions or by specifying the name or ID of the form or link. However, it does not provide built-in methods for parsing and navigating the DOM using CSS selectors or XPath directly.
To work with XPath in Python, you would typically use libraries such as lxml or xml.etree.ElementTree which provide comprehensive XPath support. If you need to use XPath with Mechanize, you can retrieve the page content using Mechanize and then parse it with one of these libraries.
Here's an example of how you might use Mechanize to fetch a page and then use lxml to parse the page and apply XPath selectors:
import mechanize
from lxml import html
# Create a browser object
br = mechanize.Browser()
# Open a webpage
response = br.open("http://example.com")
# Get the content of the page
page_content = response.read()
# Parse the content with lxml
tree = html.fromstring(page_content)
# Use XPath to select elements
elements = tree.xpath('//div[@class="example-class"]')
# Iterate over selected elements and print the text
for element in elements:
print(element.text_content())
In this example, we're using mechanize to open a webpage and then lxml.html to parse the HTML content and apply XPath expressions to find elements with a class of "example-class".
If you are looking for a more modern library that supports both CSS selectors and XPath, you may want to consider using BeautifulSoup with lxml as the parser, or Scrapy, which is a more comprehensive web scraping framework that provides built-in support for both CSS selectors and XPath.
