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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-17T07:05:23+00:00

Assume we have the following html: <html> <body> <a href="/1234.html">TEXT A</a> <a href="/3243.html">TEXT B</a>

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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.html.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?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    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>]
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