java-cssSelector-to-xpath

Java tool for transforming CSS Selector strings to XPath strings.

Visit the website that implements this tool.
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Table of Contents

• CSS Selector to XPath Conversion Implementation Notes
  • Pseudo Classes
• Dependencies
• Installation
• Usage
• Helpful Links/More Info
• About me
• License

CSS Selector to XPath Conversion Implementation Notes

• CSS Selector To XPath has been implemented for all Simple Selectors and Combinators.
• The following subset of CSS Selector Pseudo-Classes have been implemented:
  • :empty, :first-child, :last-child, :only-child, :first-of-type, :last-of-type, :only-of-type
  • (*NEW*) :nth-child(expr), :nth-last-child(expr), :nth-of-type(expr), :nth-last-of-type(expr)
    expr = {odd | even | xn+y, where x and y are integers}
• Not all Pseudo-Class CSS Selectors can be converted to XPaths.
• A possible future enhancement is to implement more Pseudo-Classes.
• Chrome Browser was used as reference implementation.
  • All base CSS Selectors and corresponding XPaths were tested cases using Chrome Browser's Developer Tools.
• Additional restrictions
  • All names and values (Elements and Attributes) are case sensitive
  • Element names and Attribute names are restricted to the following regular expression: -?[_a-zA-Z]+[_a-zA-Z0-9-]*
  • Attribute values are restricted to the following regular expression: [-_.#a-zA-Z0-9:\\/ ]+

Dependencies

This project is a pure jave applicication/API. It requries Java JDK 8 and no external jars. Within this project's baseline, there is a web-based implementation that depends on React and Spring Boot . I consider the webpage an example implementation of this project. As a result, I don't consider the dependencies for the website a requirement for the OSS.

Installation

To create the project's jar file, run the following maven command:

  mvn -f pom.javaCssSelectorToXpath.xml install

The jar file will be installed in target subdirectory and the name will include the corresponding version number of this project

Usage

• Usage as a Java Application:

     
      java -cp org.sam.rosenthal.java-cssSelector-to-xpath-<version number>.jar org.sam.rosenthal.cssselectortoxpath.utilities.CssElementCombinatorPairsToXpath <CSS Selector String> 
      -	Converts a CSS Sector String to a Xpath String
      java –cp org.sam.rosenthal.java-cssSelector-to-xpath-<version number>.jar  org.sam.rosenthal.cssselectortoxpath.utilities.CssElementCombinatorPairsToXpath -v{ersion}
      -	Displays  the version number of java-cssSlector-to-xpath
      Java –cp org.sam.rosenthal.java-cssSelector-to-xpath-<version number>.jar org.sam.rosenthal.cssselectortoxpath.utilities.CssElementCombinatorPairsToXpath -h{elp}
      -	Displays this help usage text 
    
  

• Usage as a Java method call:

  	
  	public String convertCssSelectorToXpath(String cssSelector) throws CssSelectorToXPathConverterException
  	{
  		return new CssElementCombinatorPairsToXpath().convertCssSelectorStringToXpathString(cssSelector);
  	}
  	
  

Helpful Links/More Info

• Cascading Style Sheets-Wiki
• XPath-Wiki
• XPath/CSS Equivalents
• MDN web docs CSS Selectors
• MDN web docs XPath
• W3Schools CSS Reference
• CSS Tricks Almanac
• Evaluate and validate XPath/CSS selectors in Chrome Developer Tools

About me

Sam Rosenthal - Cornell Engineering '21

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.