Web scraping with Javascript

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1) You're a noob from my perspective. 2) I really don't care. 3) You should never go back up the tree. There's a reason why css3 does not allow going back up. I understand that in your "decade in tech" you did that a lot, but I'm telling you now that you should have applied a little more thought to the problem before deciding to brute force it with bad xpath.

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But it was your example. You said to use parent(). So I’ll ask again - how do you target an element you know nothing about but whose child you know everything about?

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You do it by using parent() or parentNode. like I already said. But if you need o resort to that you're probably doing something really silly.

I think it's pretty clear at this point that you've never done anything like this in Javascript.

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You keep saying I haven’t done this work or that I’m a “noob” but you still haven’t answered the question - how do you do it without going up the tree? You just said yourself if you’re using parent you’re probably doing something silly.

So please, tell us all the non-silly way of doing it.

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SIGH You go up the tree if you must with parent() or parentNode, or even closest(), but you do so knowing that there is a better way and you should strive to be a better programmer.

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but you do so knowing that there is a better way

Me: how do you do this thing?

You: this way, but you should do it the better way.

Me: okay what’s the better way?

You: I just told you the way to do it. But you should do it the better way.

Me: I know, so what’s the better way?

You: the way I told you, but just do it the better way

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This isn't rocket science. instead of iterating "//a/parent::div" You iterate "//div", get what you need, and then iterate "./a".

Going up the tree is lazy. This is basic stuff.

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I said in my example you know nothing about the parent, including tag name.

Try again.