Writing an XPath query for Google importXML function

Question

I'm trying to find the xpath query for use in google spreadsheets (importXML function) to obtain the following information contained in the HTML code below: "ThisIsCompanyName" & "123456".

<tr valign="top" class="small"> 
                                <th width="18%" bgcolor="#EFEFEF" id="name" class="commonFontSize"> 
                                  <div align="right">Company Name</div></th>
                                <td width="33%" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" headers="name" align="left" style="padding-left:3px;"> 
                                    <span id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_lblTblCarrierName" class="oneSmallFontSize">ThisIsCompanyName</span>    
                                </td>
                                <th width="20%" bgcolor="#EFEFEF" id="dot" class="commonFontSize"> 
                                  <div align="right">U.S. DOT Number</div></th>
                                <td width="29%" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" headers="dot" align="left" style="padding-left:3px;"> 
                                    <span id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_lblTblDOTNumber" class="oneSmallFontSize">123456</span>  
                                </td>
                              </tr>

Using Chrome, if I use the "inspect element" function and then "copy xpath" I get the following....

    //*[@id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_lblTblCarrierName"]
    //*[@id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_lblTblDOTNumber"]

But these are not yielding the results i need. I have zero knowledge of programming and am just trying to learn some rudimentary web scraping techniques.

If it helps here's the website I'm trying to get this information from... ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/PassengerSearch/… — Patrick

Nora Nora · Accepted Answer · 2013-04-16T15:51:44

Try this

//span[@id='ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_lblTblCarrierName']/text()
//span[@id='ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_lblTblDOTNumber']/text()

And if you use this xpath, it will return "ThisIsCompanyName123456"

//span[@class='oneSmallFontSize']/text()

Writing an XPath query for Google importXML function

1 Answers