Re: [lxml] Xpath, span control and iterate inside xpath result.

Nov. 5, 2013

      Alexandre Delanoë, 05.11.2013 13:19:
...
Hello and many thanks for lxml module!
I am discovering its capabilities but I can hardly end up my first
parser, because of 2 issues.
First, I have a valid file.html to parse, here is an example:
<html>
  <body>
      <tbody>
      <tr>
      <td>
      <table id="tbHeaderImages">
      	<span class="Title">
      	BLO BLO
      	<span style="color:red; font-weight:bold">BLU BLU</span>
      	BLA BLA
      	</span>
      <br>
      <br>
      Some texttext
      <br>
      ...
      </table>
      </tbody>
  </body>
</html>
I have many documents each inside table:
for document in TREE.xpath('/html/body/table'):
Then, I want to extract each title:
title = document.xpath("./tr/td/span[@class = 'Title']/text()")
Problem 1: I get "BLO BLO" and "BLA BLA" whereas I would like 
"BLO BLO" and "BLU BLU" and "BLA BLA".
You could try either of the following:

  title = document.xpath("./tr/td/span[@class = 'Title']//text()")

  title = document.xpath("string(./tr/td/span[@class = 'Title'])")

or even

  text = etree.tostring(
       document.xpath("./tr/td/span[@class = 'Title']")[0],
       method='text')

depending on what exactly you want as a result.
...
Problem 2: I want also to extract "Some texttext" just after the span
class. Then, I have to trigger an event in an SAX like method. If you
agree with with how I could do such trick if I am already working in the
TREE.xpath('/html/body/table') ?
Again, multiple ways to do it. You could delete the <span> tag and then
serialise the table as text, for example. Or iterate over the children
until you find the right <br> and read its tail.

Stefan

Re: [lxml] Xpath, span control and iterate inside xpath result.

Stefan Behnel