CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonxpathlxml
Trevor
Trevor

Reputation: 1988

Python lxml XPath problem

I'm trying to print/save a certain element's HTML from a web-page.
I've retrieved the requested element's XPath from firebug.

All I wish is to save this element to a file. I don't seem to succeed in doing so.
(tried the XPath with and without a /text() at the end)

I would appreciate any help, or past experience.
10x, David 

import urllib2,StringIO
from lxml import etree

url='http://www.tutiempo.net/en/Climate/Londres_Heathrow_Airport/12-2009/37720.htm'
seite = urllib2.urlopen(url)
html = seite.read()
seite.close()
parser = etree.HTMLParser()
tree = etree.parse(StringIO.StringIO(html), parser)
xpath = "/html/body/table/tbody/tr/td[2]/div/table/tbody/tr[6]/td/table/tbody/tr/td[3]/table/tbody/tr[3]/td/table/tbody/tr/td/table/tbody/tr/td/table/tbody/text()"
elem = tree.xpath(xpath)


print elem[0].strip().encode("utf-8")

Upvotes: 5

Views: 6395

Answers (2)

AndiDog
AndiDog

Reputation: 70108

Your XPath is obviously a bit too long, why don't you try shorter ones and see if they match. One problem might be "tbody" which gets automatically created in the DOM by browsers but the HTML markup usually does not contain it.

Here's an example of how to use XPath results:

>>> from lxml import etree
>>> from StringIO import StringIO
>>> doc = etree.parse(StringIO("<html><body>a<something/>b</body></root>"), etree.HTMLParser())
>>> doc.xpath("/html/body/text()")
['a', 'b']

So you could just "".join(...) all text parts together if needed.

Upvotes: 11

Jim
Jim

Reputation: 678

Not sure I completely follow what you are trying to accomplish, but ultimately I think you are looking for:

print etree.tostring(elem[0])

Upvotes: 0

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