This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.
This method compiles an XPathExpression which can then be used for (repeated) evaluations.
You must call this method on the same document that you run the expression against.
createExpression(xpathText, namespaceURLMapper)
xpathTextA string which is the XPath expression to be compiled.
namespaceURLMapperA function which maps a namespace prefix to a namespace URL (or null if none needed).
XPathExpression const xpathExpr = document.createExpression("//div");
const xpathResult = xpathExpr.evaluate(document); // returns an XPathResult object
const nodeContext = document.querySelector("nav");
// Re-using the XPathExpression "xpathExpr"
const otherResult = xpathExpr.evaluate(nodeContext); // returns an XPathResult object
| Specification |
|---|
| DOM> # dom-xpathevaluatorbase-createexpression> |
| Desktop | Mobile | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chrome | Edge | Firefox | Opera | Safari | Chrome Android | Firefox for Android | Opera Android | Safari on IOS | Samsung Internet | WebView Android | WebView on iOS | |
createExpression |
1 | 12 | 1 | ≤12.1 | 3 | 18 | 4 | ≤12.1 | 1 | 1.0 | 3 | 1 |
© 2005–2025 MDN contributors.
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License v2.5 or later.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/createExpression