Xpath - multiple nested divs with tables holding text value

Question

I encountered complicated html structure on website from which i want to extract text information.

Website has following structure:

<ul class = "listing_pages">
    <li id = "list_1" style = ""></li>
    <li id = "list_2" style = ""></li>
    <li id = "list_3" style = ""></li>
    <li id = "list_4" style = ""></li>
    <li id = "list_5" style = ""></li>
    <li id = "list_6" style = ""></li>
    <li id = "list_7" style = ""></li>
    <li id = "list_8" style = ""></li>
    <li id = "list_9" style = ""></li>
</ul>

Each id="list_*" unfolds into

<li id="list_1">
<div class="description_block">
<table valign="top">
<tbody>
<tr valign="top">
<td width="400px">
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="width:350px">
<div></div>
<table></table>
<table cellspacing="0">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td height="15px">
<h2>
<a class="product_title" title="PRODUCT_NAME" href="http://example.com">PRODUCT_NAME</a>

Its nightmarish structure! And its repeated for eatch list_*

Relative Xpath for following is

/div[9]/div[2]/div[3]/div[2]/form/div/div[2]/ul/li[1]/div[2]/table/tbody/tr/td[1]/table/tbody/tr/td/table[2]/tbody/tr/td/h2/a

Which fails.

Few things i tried, with limited success are,

response.xpath('//*[@id="one"]//table//tr//h2//a[position()]//text()').extract()

This extracts all /h2/a from page, not from single list_*

response.xpath('//*[@id="list_1"]//table//tr//h2//a//text()').extract()

This extracts text correctly but only from first list_1 div. I can increment it with extract()[++i], but that is not optimal solution and i think there are definitely better ways to do it.

What i want to accomplish is:

Extract text (PRODUCT_NAME) from each list_* in order.

vezunchik vezunchik · Accepted Answer · 2019-02-19T15:03:20

Maybe try css selector like: response.css('li[id*="list_"] a.product_title::text').extract()? Or xpath response.xpath('//li[contains(@id, "list_")]//a[contains(@class, "product_title")]/text()')?

UPD: For iteration:

for item in response.css('li[id*="list_"]'):
    print item.css('a.product_title::text').get()

or

for item in response.xpath('//li[contains(@id, "list_")]'):
    print item.xpath('.//a[contains(@class, "product_title")]/text()').get()

Xpath - multiple nested divs with tables holding text value

2 Answers