Xpath in python

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9 points

I have a python application in which I am scrapping data from a particular website.. and I want to use xpath. How do I use xpath library in python?

1 year 41 weeks ago   Tags:


15 points

Use the lxml2 (http://codespeak.net/lxml/) package. It supports xpath. You can also try beautifulsoup for parsing your web-application which is widely used for scraping applications in Python.

For lxml2 as per their website, basic test of XPath wrappers: 

import libxml2
 
doc = libxml2.parseFile("tst.xml")
ctxt = doc.xpathNewContext()
res = ctxt.xpathEval("//*")
if len(res) != 2:
    print "xpath query: wrong node set size"
    sys.exit(1)
if res[0].name != "doc" or res[1].name != "foo":
    print "xpath query: wrong node set value"
    sys.exit(1)
doc.freeDoc()
ctxt.xpathFreeContext()

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