Parsing with lxml xpath

Question

I was trying to implement a lxml, xpath code to parse html from link: https://www.theice.com/productguide/ProductSpec.shtml?specId=251 Specifically, I was trying to parse the <tr class="last"> table at near the end of the page.

I wanted to obtain the text in that sub-table, for example: "New York" and the hours listed next to it (and do the same for London and Singapore) .

I have the following code (which doesn't work properly):

doc = lxml.html.fromstring(page)
tds = doc.xpath('//table[@class="last"]//table[@id"tradingHours"]/tbody/tr/td/text()')

With BeautifulSoup:

table = soup.find('table', attrs={'id':'tradingHours'})
for td in table.findChildren('td'):
    print td.text

What is the best method to achieve this? I want to use lxml not beautifulSoup (just to see the difference).

Answer 1

Your lxml code is very close to working. The main problem is that the table tag is not the one with the class="last" attribute. Rather, it is a tr tag that has that attribute:

    </tr><tr class="last"><td>TRADING HOURS</td>&#13;

Thus,

//table[@class="last"]

has no matches. There is also a minor syntax error: @id"tradingHours" should be @id="tradingHours".

You can also omit //table[@class="last"] entirely since table[@id="tradingHours"] is specific enough.

---

The closest analog to your BeautifulSoup code would be:

import urllib2
import lxml.html as LH

url = 'https://www.theice.com/productguide/ProductSpec.shtml?specId=251'
doc = LH.parse(urllib2.urlopen(url))
for td in doc.xpath('//table[@id="tradingHours"]//td/text()'):
    print(td.strip())

---

The grouper recipe, zip(*[iterable]*n), is often very useful when parsing tables. It collects the items in iterable into groups of n items. We could use it here like this:

texts = iter(doc.xpath('//table[@id="tradingHours"]//td/text()'))
for group in zip(*[texts]*5):
    row = [item.strip() for item in group]
    print('\n'.join(row))
    print('-'*80)

I'm not terribly good at explaining how the grouper recipe works, but I've made an attempt here.

---

This page is using JavaScript to reformat the dates. To scrape the page after the JavaScript has altered the contents, you could use selenium:

import urllib2
import lxml.html as LH
import contextlib
import selenium.webdriver as webdriver

url = 'https://www.theice.com/productguide/ProductSpec.shtml?specId=251'
with contextlib.closing(webdriver.PhantomJS('phantomjs')) as driver:
    driver.get(url)
    content = driver.page_source
    doc = LH.fromstring(content)
    texts = iter(doc.xpath('//table[@id="tradingHours"]//td/text()'))
    for group in zip(*[texts]*5):
        row = [item.strip() for item in group]
        print('\n'.join(row))
        print('-'*80)

yields

NEW YORK
8:00 PM-2:15 PM *
20:00-14:15
7:30 PM
19:30
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LONDON
1:00 AM-7:15 PM
01:00-19:15
12:30 AM
00:30
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SINGAPORE
8:00 AM-2:15 AM *
08:00-02:15
7:30 AM
07:30
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note that in this particular case, if you did not want to use selenium, you could use pytz to parse and convert the times yourself:

import dateutil.parser as parser
import pytz

text = 'Tue Jul 30 20:00:00 EDT 2013'
date = parser.parse(text)
date = date.replace(tzinfo=None)
print(date.strftime('%I:%M %p'))
# 08:00 PM

ny = pytz.timezone('America/New_York')
london = pytz.timezone('Europe/London')
london_date = ny.localize(date).astimezone(london)
print(london_date.strftime('%I:%M %p'))
# 01:00 AM

Answer 2

I like css selectors much adaptive on page changes than xpaths:

import urllib
from lxml import html

url = 'https://www.theice.com/productguide/ProductSpec.shtml?specId=251'

response = urllib.urlopen(url).read()

h = html.document_fromstring(response)
for tr in h.cssselect('#tradingHours tbody tr'):
    td = tr.cssselect('td')
    print td[0].text_content(), td[1].text_content()

Answer 3

If the site is proper html, id attributes are unique and you can find the table at doc.get_element_by_id('tradingHours').

import urllib
from lxml import html

url = 'https://www.theice.com/productguide/ProductSpec.shtml?specId=251'

response = urllib.urlopen(url).read()

h = html.document_fromstring(response)

print "BY ID"
tradingHours = h.get_element_by_id('tradingHours')

for tr in tradingHours.xpath('tbody/tr'):
    tds = tr.xpath('td')
    print tds[0].text.strip()
    for td in tds[1:]:
        print ' ', td.text.strip()

Results in

BY ID
NEW YORK
  Tue Jul 30 20:00:00 EDT 2013-Tue Jul 30 14:15:00 EDT 2013 *
  Tue Jul 30 19:30:00 EDT 2013
LONDON
  Tue Jul 30 20:00:00 EDT 2013-Tue Jul 30 14:15:00 EDT 2013
  Tue Jul 30 19:30:00 EDT 2013
SINGAPORE
  Tue Jul 30 20:00:00 EDT 2013-Tue Jul 30 14:15:00 EDT 2013 *
  Tue Jul 30 19:30:00 EDT 2013