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Asked: 2026-06-05T15:23:35+00:00

I am using Python 2.7 lxml and I am having problems finding the table.

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I am using Python 2.7 lxml and I am having problems finding the table.

Finding it by id od class produces null result.

 a = [c.text for c in kontent.xpath('//table[@id="blk-ctnt-2308"[1]//tr/td[5]]

Any other suggestions?

Thank you

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You are missing square brackets in the XPath expression, before the index [1]:

    a = [c.text for c in kontent.xpath('//table[@id="blk-ctnt-2308"][1]//tr/td[5]') ]

    Also, you may want to check if the first part of the expression works //table[@id="blk-ctnt-2308"][1] before you try out the full one.

    Finally, if the source table has an id attribute, the index [1] is redundant but should still work.

    Update

    I can’t use lxml on this machine, so I am using the ElementTree XML API in order to test the XPath, this code:

    import xml.etree.ElementTree

html = '''<html>
<head><title></title></head>
<body>
<table id="blk-ctnt-2308">
<tr><td>1a</td><td>2a</td><td>3a</td><td>4a</td><td>5a</td><td>6a</td></tr>
<tr><td>1b</td><td>2b</td><td>3b</td><td>4b</td><td>5b</td><td>6b</td></tr>
<tr><td>1c</td><td>2c</td><td>3c</td><td>4c</td><td>5c</td><td>6c</td></tr>
</table>
<table id="blk-ctnt-2309">
<tr><td>1a</td><td>2a</td><td>3a</td><td>4a</td><td>5a</td><td>6a</td></tr>
<tr><td>1b</td><td>2b</td><td>3b</td><td>4b</td><td>5b</td><td>6b</td></tr>
<tr><td>1c</td><td>2c</td><td>3c</td><td>4c</td><td>5c</td><td>6c</td></tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>'''

tree = xml.etree.ElementTree.fromstring(html)
results = [ c.text
            for c in tree.findall('body/table[@id="blk-ctnt-2308"]//tr/td[5]') ]
print results

    Produces this output:

    ['5a', '5b', '5c']
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