XPath or querySelector?

javascript xpath css-selectors greasemonkey selectors-api
aeosynth picture aeosynth · Jun 30, 2009 · Viewed 11.3k times · Source

XPath can do everything querySelector can do, and more, so when would you ever choose the latter? I haven't seen any speed benchmarks comparing the two, so right now I'm choosing based on syntax conciseness, which seems kind of arbitrary.

Edit: I probably should have stated that I'm writing Greasemonkey scripts for Firefox, so I'm not worried about cross-browser compatibility, and would rather not include any libraries.

Answer

Yehuda Katz picture Yehuda Katz · Jun 30, 2009

What browser are you using? In Safari (or the iPhone), querySelector and querySelectorAll are much faster than XPath. IE doesn't support XPath at all, and IE6 and IE7 don't support querySelector. The fastest cross-browser selector engine is Sizzle, created by John Resig. Sizzle is also the main selector engine used in jQuery. It uses querySelector where appropriate and normal DOM methods where querySelector is unavailable.

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