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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-15T15:21:05+00:00

I am pulling text out from an html tag attribute using lxml and xpath

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I am pulling text out from an html tag attribute using lxml and xpath via tag.attrib['title']. I get:

Málaga Airport

where in the browser with the same url I am seeing:

Málaga Airport

How do I convert the former to the later?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It seems that the lxml html parser assumes a ‘latin1’ encoding for byte strings.

    So unless the input is encoded as ‘latin1’ (or ‘ascii’), the encoding needs to be specified explicitly. In this case, it looks like it should be ‘utf-8’:

    >>> from lxml import etree
>>>
>>> html = u"""
... <html>
... <head><title>Test</title></head>
... <body>
... <p test="Málaga">Example</p>
... </body>
... </html>
... """
>>>
>>> html = html.encode('utf-8')
>>>
>>> parser = etree.HTMLParser()
>>> tree = etree.fromstring(html, parser)
>>> print tree.xpath('//p/@test')[0]
Málaga
>>>
>>> parser = etree.HTMLParser(encoding='utf-8')
>>> tree = etree.fromstring(html, parser)
>>> print tree.xpath('//p/@test')[0]
Málaga
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