How do I get the nth element with a certain name in the entire XML document?

Question

so will something like this work using Hpple Xpath

//a[4]

The fourth tag in a html tree? Or do i need to do it programmatically by counting in a for() loop?

Answer 1

The XPath for the fourth <a> in an HTML document is:

(//a)[4]

Your example //a[4] will produce a set of all <a>s that are the fourth <a> in their respective parent, and that is not what you want here.

See also: https://stackoverflow.com/a/14209492/1945651