How to use lxml to find an element by text?
Assume we have the following html:
<html>
<body>
<a href="/1234.html">TEXT A</a>
<a href="/3243.html">TEXT B</a>
<a href="/7445.html">TEXT C</a>
<body>
</html>
How do I make it find the element "a", which contains "TEXT A"?
So far I've got:
root = lxml.hmtl.document_fromstring(the_html_above)
e = root.find('.//a')
I've tried:
e = root.find('.//a[@text="TEXT A"]')
but that didn't work, as the "a" tags have no attribute "text".
Is there any way I can solve this in a similar fashion to what I've tried?
Answer
You are very close. Use text()= rather than @text (which indicates an attribute).
e = root.xpath('.//a[text()="TEXT A"]')
Or, if you know only that the text contains "TEXT A",
e = root.xpath('.//a[contains(text(),"TEXT A")]')
Or, if you know only that text starts with "TEXT A",
e = root.xpath('.//a[starts-with(text(),"TEXT A")]')
See the docs for more on the available string functions.
For example,
import lxml.html as LH
text = '''\
<html>
<body>
<a href="/1234.html">TEXT A</a>
<a href="/3243.html">TEXT B</a>
<a href="/7445.html">TEXT C</a>
<body>
</html>'''
root = LH.fromstring(text)
e = root.xpath('.//a[text()="TEXT A"]')
print(e)
yields
[<Element a at 0xb746d2cc>]