depojones has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi Monks, I'm scrapping a site and the links have same class name,e.g: 
<a class="nav" href="index.html">&nbsp;&nbsp;Home&nbsp;&nbsp;</a>

<a class="nav" href="about.html">&nbsp;&nbsp;About us&nbsp;&nbsp;</a>

<a class="nav" href="contact.html">&nbsp;&nbsp;Contact us&nbsp;&nbsp;<
+/a>

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Xpath is identifying more than one element for class name "nav" 
$mech->click({xpath => '//a[@class="nav"]',  synchronize=>0, });

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My question is, how do I click the nth tag (contact us) from the example above? Thanks

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Mechanize Firefox xpath link with same name
by Corion (Patriarch) on Jul 15, 2014 at 12:42 UTC

    You can add an index to XPath queries if you want the nth element:

    //parent/a[@class="nav"][4]

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    Note that the following does not work because numbering is according to parent/ancestor, not in the results:

    //a[@class="nav"][4]

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    If you don't have a suitable common ancestor, you will have to find the element by using the text() function or extract the element using Perl:

    my @nav= $mech->xpath('//a[@class="nav"]');
$mech->click( $nav[3] );

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      Thanks for your prompt reply. The example you provided worked as expected. Thank you once again!
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