How to get string using xpath in python bs4?-CodePudding

I need to get a string into a li tag using python and bs4. I'm trying with the code below:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from lxml import etree

html_doc = """
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
   <div >
      <section id="page">
         <div >   
            <div >  
               <ul>
                  <li>Name: Peter</li>
                  <li>Age: 21</li>
                  <li>Status: Active</li>
               </ul> 
            </div>
         </div>
      </section>
   </div>
</body>
</html>
"""

soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'lxml')
dom = etree.HTML(str(soup))
print (dom.xpath('/html/body/div/section/div[1]/div[1]/ul/li[3]'))

That one returns: [<Element li at 0x7fc640e896c0>]

but the desired result is the li tag text like below: Status: Active

How to do? Thanks

CodePudding user response：

In xpath just you have to use text() method

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from lxml import etree

html_doc = """
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
   <div >
      <section id="page">
         <div >   
            <div >  
               <ul>
                  <li>Name: Peter</li>
                  <li>Age: 21</li>
                  <li>Status: Active</li>
               </ul> 
            </div>
         </div>
      </section>
   </div>
</body>
</html>
"""

soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'lxml')
dom = etree.HTML(str(soup))
print(dom.xpath('/html/body/div/section/div[1]/div[1]/ul/li[3]/text())

Output:

 ['Status: Active']

#OR

for li in dom.xpath('/html/body/div/section/div[1]/div[1]/ul/li[3]/text()'):
    txt=li.split()[1]
    print(txt)

Output:

Active

#OR

print(' '.join(dom.xpath('/html/body/div/section/div[1]/div[1]/ul/li[3]/text()')))

Output:

Status: Active

#OR

print(''.join(dom.xpath('//*[@]/ul/li[3]/text()')))

Output:

Status: Active

CodePudding user response：

Try the below (no external lib required)

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

xml = """
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
   <div >
      <section id="page">
         <div >   
            <div >  
               <ul>
                  <li>Name: Peter</li>
                  <li>Age: 21</li>
                  <li>Status: Active</li>
               </ul> 
            </div>
         </div>
      </section>
   </div>
</body>
</html>
"""
root = ET.fromstring(xml)
print(root.find('.//ul')[-1].text)

output

Status: Active