Find the XPATH for a table of data

Question

I'm trying to learn about scraping information from a website for iOS and I'm using a website of a local radio station to practice. I have tried by best to figure out the Xpath needed to present the information within the tags in a table. The HTML is as follows (there are many more table rows, this is just the first one).

EDIT

<form action="http://www.someurl.ie/index.php/news" method="post" name="adminForm" id="adminForm">
<table class="category">
    <tbody>
        <tr class="cat-list-row0" >

            <td class="list-title">
                <a href="/index.php/news/some-news-story-here">
                        some news story here</a>
                    </td>
                        </tr>

This is the path that I have come up with but it hasn't worked for me. Could anyone direct me as to what I'm doing wrong/missing with this?

@"//div[@class='cat-items']/form[@id=adminForm]/@action/table[@class='category']/tbody/tr[@class='cat-list-row']/td[@class='list-title']/a"])
<div class="cat-items">

If anyone could help or point me in the direction of help I would be very grateful. Thanks!

Can only assume up to /form, would have expected /form[@id='adminForm']. Start from //div. if that works add more specifiers, until it goes wrong on you. — Tony Hopkinson, Dec 15 '13 at 23:34
Have a look at the source code (using "view source code", not Firebug/Chrome Developer Tools). Does the table really contain `` elements? Compare http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18241029/why-does-my-xpath-query-scraping-html-tables-only-work-in-firebug-but-not-the. Also: Please include all relevant code, this includes the div you're querying (but Tony is right on better starting at the form having the id attribute). And if cutting HTML, do not omit the closing HTML tags, makes testing against the example input much much harder. — Jens Erat, Dec 16 '13 at 01:04

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 16 '13 at 04:53

0

There are three problems in your XPath expression:

The <form/> id 'adminForm' is unquoted
The attribute @action is a path step in the middle of the expression
The <tr/> class 'cat-list-row0' is missing the zero.

The corrected expression:

@"//div[@class='cat-items']/form[@id='adminForm']/table[@class='category']/tbody/tr[@class='cat-list-row0']/td[@class='list-title']/a"

answered Dec 16 '13 at 04:53

joemfb

3,056
20
19

Hi guys, apologies for the poor quality of the original post. The original does include tags as well as closing and
tags. I didn't include them as there are over 30 rows of data to in the original page. Thank you for all your answers. However it doesn't seem to have worked for me. I should explain that when I just query , each cell in the tableview is filled with the data from every tag in the page. I'm looking to pull the data from the tag from within a specific table of data. Hope this makes it clearer. Thanks again for your answers and help!
– Onion Dec 16 '13 at 08:20
@Onion. Instead of trying to do the thing in one go. Do the Xpath for the first node (//div). Check it found the correct one, then add the next one, check that. Standard debugging procedure, way faster than repeated guesses. – Tony Hopkinson Dec 16 '13 at 09:55

Find the XPATH for a table of data

1 Answers1