Xpath keep a place for empty node value

Question

I try to extract values from this:

<tr>
     <td>a</td>
     <td>a</td>
     <td>b</td>
     <td></td>
     <td>b</td> 
</tr>

//td/text() returns:

a
a
b
b

How can I get the following output?

a
a
b

b

Have you read this one? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2420705/how-do-i-return-for-an-empty-nodes-text-in-xpath — Dmytro Pastovenskyi, Feb 03 '16 at 22:12

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 04 '16 at 01:17

If you are using lxml.html - loop over the td elements found and get the text_content():

from lxml.html import fromstring

data = """
<tr>
     <td>a</td>
     <td>a</td>
     <td>b</td>
     <td></td>
     <td>b</td>
</tr>"""

tree = fromstring(data)

for td in tree.xpath(".//td"):
    print(td.text_content())

Prints:

a
a
b

b

Xpath keep a place for empty node value

1 Answers1