Body Appendages

We have loaded the HTML from a secret website and have used it to create a function how_many_elements(). The way this function works is that you pass it an XPath string and it will print out the number of elements the XPath you wrote has selected. For example, by running the code how_many_elements('//*') in the console will print out the total number of elements the HTML document has (try it!).

Your job in this exercise is to create an XPath string which can be used to direct to all child elements the body (regardless of tag type). To note, you can first test your solution with how_many_elements() to find the total number of children in the body element if you wish.

Note that the exercises in this chapter may take some time to load.

This exercise is part of the course

Web Scraping in Python

View Course

Exercise instructions

Assign to the variable xpath an XPath string which directs to all child elements of the body element. There is only one body element in this HTML document and it is a child of the root html element.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Create an XPath string to direct to children of body element
xpath = ____

# Print out the number of elements selected
how_many_elements( xpath )

Edit and Run Code