CSS Selector vs. XPath: Proxy Capture Selector Comparison

First, what the hell is a selector?

Older drivers of data collection will have seen these two words before - CSS selector and XPath. in simple terms they're likeGPS locator for web elementsThe first is to help us find the exact data we need in the HTML document. For example, you want to collect the price of an e-commerce site, both tools can help you lock the price tag location.

 CSS Selector Example
price = response.css('.product-price::text').get()

 XPath example
price = response.xpath('//span[@class="product-price"]/text()').get()

Second, the six major differences in the actual combat comparison

III. Special Scenarios in Proxy Acquisition

When using ipipgo's proxy IPs for acquisition, you will often encounterSudden upgrade of anti-climbing mechanismcase. This is where XPath's axis localization comes in handy, for example, to find a price tag with a changed class name:

//div[contains(@class,'price-box')]/following-sibling::span[1]

And CSS selectors may need to write longer selection chains when dealing with such dynamic changes. That's when it would be a good idea to pair it with ipipgo'sDynamic IP PoolThe collection success rate can be directly pulled full by adjusting the selection strategy while rotating IPs.

IV. Selection Decision Guide

According to our experience of real testing in the agent acquisition project:

• Simple pages with CSS - fast and concise writing style
• Complex structures with XPath - accurate positioning is not afraid of nested
• It's more reliable to use a mix - e.g. use CSS to locate blocks first, then use XPath to extract details

To give a real case: when collecting a travel website, using ipipgo's residential proxy + hybrid selector program, successfully bypassing geographic restrictions, the data acquisition rate soared from 52% to 97%.

V. Frequently Asked Questions QA

Q: Which selector to choose is less likely to be blocked?
A: This mainly depends on the site's anti-climbing strategy, it is recommended to use ipipgo'sHighly anonymized proxy IPCombined with a random selector scheme to reduce the risk of feature recognition.

Q: Why is my XPath suddenly not working?
A: eighty percent of the webpage structure changed, it is recommended to prepare 2-3 sets of positioning programs at the same time, with ipipgo's IP automatic switching function, encountered the ban immediately switch.

Q: How is ipipgo's proxy integrated into the capture script?
A: In Python, for example, configure it this way in the requests library:

proxies = {
  'http': 'http://用户名:密码@gateway.ipipgo.com:端口',
  'https': 'http://用户名:密码@gateway.ipipgo.com:端口'
}

Finally knock on the blackboard: there is no absolute answer to selector selection, the key is to adjust flexibly according to the characteristics of the target site. Use ipipgo'sIntelligent Routing Agent, with the dual selector program, basically can handle the market 90% collection needs. When in doubt, remember to turn on the ipipgo console!Request Log Analysis, quickly locate the root cause of the problem.