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Lxml xpath returns an empty list

<!DOCTYPE html><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="pc chrome win psc_dir-ltr psc_form-xlarge" dir="ltr" lang="en">
<title>Some Title</title>
</html>

if I run:

from lxml import etree
html = etree.parse('text.txt')
result = html.xpath('//title')
print(result)

I will get an empty list. I assume this has something to do with the namespace, but I can't figure out how to fix it.

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3 answers

Try creating a tree using the html parser. Also note that if it text.txtis a file, it will need to be read first.

with open('text.txt', 'r', encoding='utf8') as f:
    text_html = f.read()

like this:

from lxml import etree, html

def build_lxml_tree(_html):
    tree = html.fromstring(_html)
    tree = etree.ElementTree(tree)
    return tree

tree = build_lxml_tree(text_html)
result = tree.xpath('//title')
print(result)
+1
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You can also use the HTML parser:

from lxml import etree
parser = etree.HTMLParser() 
html = etree.parse('text.txt',parser)
result = html.xpath('//title')
print(result)
+1
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You can do the following:

from lxml import etree
parser = etree.HTMLParser() 
html = etree.parse('text.txt',parser)
result = html.xpath('//title/text()')
print(result)

Conclusion:

['Some Title']
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/1682182/

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