Question

i have following HTML code:-

<table class="results">
  <tr>
    <td>
      <a href="..">link</a><span>2nd Mar 2011</span><br>XYZ Consultancy Ltd<br>
       <div>....</div>
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

I am using lxml+python code to parse above HTML file. I want to retrieve “XYZ Consultancy Ltd” but I am not able to find out how to do this. So far my code is as follows:-

import lxml.html
for el in root.cssselect("table.results"):    
 for el2 in el: #tr tags
  for e13 in el2:#td tags
     for e14 in e13:
      if ( e14.tag == 'a') :
         print "keyword: ",e14.text_content()
      if (e14.tag == 'span'):
         print "date: ",e14.text_content()

Answer 1

You can use the CSS Selector +, a direct adjacent combinator, to get at the <br> preceding the text. Then, the target text is contained in its tail attribute.

import lxml.html
root = lxml.html.fromstring('''
<table class="results">
  <tr>
    <td>
      <a href="..">link</a><span>2nd Mar 2011</span><br>XYZ Consultancy Ltd<br>
       <div>....</div>
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>
''')
for br_with_tail in root.cssselect('table.results > tr > td > a + span + br'):
    print br_with_tail.tail
    # => XYZ Consultancy Ltd