How to use regular expression in lxml xpath?

python regex xpath lxml
Arty picture Arty · May 3, 2010 · Viewed 19.5k times · Source

I'm using construction like this:

doc = parse(url).getroot()
links = doc.xpath("//a[text()='some text']")

But I need to select all links which have text beginning with "some text", so I'm wondering is there any way to use regexp here? Didn't find anything in lxml documentation

Answer

Steven picture Steven · May 3, 2010

You can do this (although you don't need regular expressions for the example). Lxml supports regular expressions from the EXSLT extension functions. (see the lxml docs for the XPath class, but it also works for the xpath() method)

doc.xpath("//a[re:match(text(), 'some text')]", 
        namespaces={"re": "http://exslt.org/regular-expressions"})

Note that you need to give the namespace mapping, so that it knows what the "re" prefix in the xpath expression stands for.

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