XPath expression to be used with importXML

1
votes

From the website https://www.google.co.uk/finance?cid=704531 I'm trying to import the fields "Range" and "52 week" and the others in that group in the middle. I've looked at XPath and am very confused by it.

In cell A1 I have https://www.google.co.uk/finance?cid=704531.

In cell B1 I have

=importxml(A1,//*[@id="market-data-div"]/div[2]/div[1]/table[1]/tbody/tr[4]/td[1])

But the result is an error.

What's the correct XPath expression for this HTML structure?

1
domxpathgoogle-sheetsgoogle-sheets-formulagoogle-sheets-importxml
Welcome on Stackoverflow! Please pay a little more attention on formatting and do not use all caps, it makes your question hard to read and understand and reduces chances somebody will answer it. The faq has some information on how to use Markdown for formatting your posts. Some kudos (and upvote) for trying yourself before asking! - Jens Erat
possible duplicate of Why does my XPath query (scraping HTML tables) only work in Firebug, but not the application I'm developing? - Jens Erat

1 Answers

4
votes

Dom and the <tbody/>

It seems you created that XPath expression within Firebug or similar developer tools. While HTML does not require <tbody/> tags, DOM does; and those developer tools work on the DOM and thus wrap the table rows in such an element. You can easily see the difference when looking at the page source (fetched by wget or other tools if necessary) and the structure presented by Firebug.

Just omit the /tbody axis step in your expression:

//*[@id='market-data-div']/div[2]/div[1]/table[1]/tr[4]/td[1]

Anyway, I'd rather go for fetching the cells by the description, which is a little weaker regarding changes on the wording, but much more robust to changes on the structure:

//*[@id='market-data-div']//tr[td = 'Vol / Avg.']/td[2]

Quoting the Expression

A second problem is you have to quote the XPath expression in double quotes, so for example use:

=importxml(A1,"//*[@id='market-data-div']//tr[td = 'Vol / Avg.']/td[2]")