Introduction > Web Scraping Techniques > XPath and Selection Techniques

Proper selection technique is a critical aspect of web-scraping. The most basic selection technique is to point-and-click on elements in the web browser panel, which is the easiest way to add commands to an agent. XPath is a common syntax for selecting elements in HTML and XML documents. Each time you click on an element in the web browser, Content Grabber works in the background to calculate the selection XPath.

Content Grabber has a variety of tools that help you create precise XPaths without needing to know XPath syntax at all. If you want finer control over element selection, it's worthwhile to learn some specifics about XPath syntax. Although this user guide doesn't include an XPath tutorial, there are many tutorials available on the web. We recommend this as a good place to learn more about XPath: