How do I match contents of an element in XPath (lxml)?
I would try with:
.//a[text()='Example']
using xpath() method:
tree.xpath(".//a[text()='Example']")[0].tag
If case you would like to use iterfind(), findall(), find(), findtext(), keep in mind that advanced features like value comparison and functions are not available in ElementPath.
lxml.etree supports the simple path syntax of the find, findall and findtext methods on ElementTree and Element, as known from the original ElementTree library (ElementPath). As an lxml specific extension, these classes also provide an xpath() method that supports expressions in the complete XPath syntax, as well as custom extension functions.
Comments
-
akosch almost 2 years
I want to parse HTML with lxml using XPath expressions. My problem is matching for the contents of a tag:
For example given the
<a href="http://something">Example</a>
element I can match the href attribute using
.//a[@href='http://something']
but the given the expression
.//a[.='Example']
or even
.//a[contains(.,'Example')]
lxml throws the 'invalid node predicate' exception.
What am I doing wrong?
EDIT:
Example code:
from lxml import etree from cStringIO import StringIO html = '<a href="http://something">Example</a>' parser = etree.HTMLParser() tree = etree.parse(StringIO(html), parser) print tree.find(".//a[text()='Example']").tag
Expected output is 'a'. I get 'SyntaxError: invalid node predicate'
-
akosch about 14 yearsI don't want to find the link based on href, but based on the text it contains: "Example" in the above example :) .//a[@href='something'] works the way it is...
-
Greg about 14 yearsyou need to remove an = .//a[text()='Example']
-
akosch about 14 yearsThanks for your suggestion, but this one raises "SyntaxError: invalid node predicate" too
-
akosch about 14 yearsThank you: with XPath() it really works. Strangely enough @href works in both cases.
-
SIslam over 8 years@systempuntoout Then is
.//a[text()='Example']
invalid in this case?