HTML parsing using lxml code

Question

i have following HTML code:-

<table class="results">
  <tr>
    <td>
      <a href="..">link</a><span>2nd Mar 2011</span><br>XYZ Consultancy Ltd<br>
       <div>....</div>
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

I am using lxml+python code to parse above HTML file. I want to retrieve "XYZ Consultancy Ltd" but I am not able to find out how to do this. So far my code is as follows:-

import lxml.html
for el in root.cssselect("table.results"):    
 for el2 in el: #tr tags
  for e13 in el2:#td tags
     for e14 in e13:
      if ( e14.tag == 'a') :
         print "keyword: ",e14.text_content()
      if (e14.tag == 'span'):
         print "date: ",e14.text_content()

Why don't you use an XPath expression here?

user2665694
– user2665694

2011-04-13 08:03:01 +00:00
Commented Apr 13, 2011 at 8:03 — user2665694
– user2665694, Commented Apr 13, 2011 at 8:03

ento · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-13 08:18:20Z

2

You can use the CSS Selector +, a direct adjacent combinator, to get at the <br> preceding the text. Then, the target text is contained in its tail attribute.

import lxml.html
root = lxml.html.fromstring('''
<table class="results">
  <tr>
    <td>
      <a href="..">link</a><span>2nd Mar 2011</span><br>XYZ Consultancy Ltd<br>
       <div>....</div>
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>
''')
for br_with_tail in root.cssselect('table.results > tr > td > a + span + br'):
    print br_with_tail.tail
    # => XYZ Consultancy Ltd

answered Apr 13, 2011 at 8:18

ento

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Comments

Mark Longair · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-13 09:39:54Z

One way of doing this is to use XPath to find such an a node, and check that the next two elements are span and br. If so, look at the tail attribute of the br element:

from lxml import etree

data = '''<table class="results">
  <tr>
    <td>
      <a href="..">link</a><span>2nd Mar 2011</span><br>XYZ Consultancy Ltd<br>
       <div>....</div>
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>'''

root = etree.HTML(data)

for e in root.xpath('//table[@class="results"]/tr/td/a'):
    parsed_tag = e.text
    next = e.getnext()
    if next is None or next.tag != 'span':
        continue
    parsed_date = next.text
    next_next = next.getnext()
    if next_next is None or next_next.tag != 'br':
        continue
    print 'tag: ', parsed_tag
    print 'date: ', parsed_date
    print 'company: ', next_next.tail

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