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Asked: 2026-05-18T01:36:55+00:00

I have some html file with span elements: <html> <body> <span class=one>Text</span>some text</br> <span

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I have some html file with span elements:

<html>
<body>
<span class="one">Text</span>some text</br>
<span class="two">Привет</span>Текст на русском</br>
</body>
</html>

To get “some text” :

# -*- coding:cp1251 -*-
import lxml
from lxml import html

filename = "t.html"
fread = open(filename, 'r')
source = fread.read()

tree = html.fromstring(source)
fread.close()


tags = tree.xpath('//span[@class="one" and text()="Text"]') #This OK
print "name: ",tags[0].text
print "value: ",tags[0].tail

tags = tree.xpath('//span[@class="two" and text()="Привет"]') #This False

print "name: ",tags[0].text
print "value: ",tags[0].tail

This show:

name: Text
value: some text

Traceback: ... in line `tags = tree.xpath('//span[@class="two" and text()="Привет"]')`
    ValueError: All strings must be XML compatible: Unicode or ASCII, no NULL bytes

How to solve this problem?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    lxml

    (As observed, this is a bit dodgy between system encodings and apparently doesn’t work properly in Windows XP, though it did in Linux.)

    I got it to work by decoding the source string – tree = html.fromstring(source.decode('utf-8')):

    # -*- coding:cp1251 -*-
import lxml
from lxml import html

filename = "t.html"
fread = open(filename, 'r')
source = fread.read()

tree = html.fromstring(source.decode('utf-8'))
fread.close()


tags = tree.xpath('//span[@class="one" and text()="Text"]') #This OK
print "name: ",tags[0].text
print "value: ",tags[0].tail

tags = tree.xpath('//span[@class="two" and text()="Привет"]') #This is now OK too

print "name: ",tags[0].text
print "value: ",tags[0].tail

    This means that the actual tree is all unicode objects. If you just put the xpath parameter as a unicode it finds 0 matches.

    BeautifulSoup

    I prefer to use BeautifulSoup for any of this sort of stuff, anyway. Here is my interactive session; I saved the file in cp1251.

    >>> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
>>> filename = '/tmp/cyrillic'
>>> fread = open(filename, 'r')
>>> source = fread.read()
>>> source  # Scary
'<html>\n<body>\n<span class="one">Text</span>some text</br>\n<span class="two">\xcf\xf0\xe8\xe2\xe5\xf2</span>\xd2\xe5\xea\xf1\xf2 \xed\xe0 \xf0\xf3\xf1\xf1\xea\xee\xec</br>\n</body>\n</html>\n'
>>> source = source.decode('cp1251')  # Let's try getting this right.
u'<html>\n<body>\n<span class="one">Text</span>some text</br>\n<span class="two">\u041f\u0440\u0438\u0432\u0435\u0442</span>\u0422\u0435\u043a\u0441\u0442 \u043d\u0430 \u0440\u0443\u0441\u0441\u043a\u043e\u043c</br>\n</body>\n</html>\n'
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(source)
>>> soup  # OK, that's looking right now. Note the </br> was dropped as that's bad HTML with no meaning.
<html>
<body>
<span class="one">Text</span>some text
<span class="two">Привет</span>Текст на русском
</body>
</html>

>>> soup.find('span', 'one').findNextSibling(text=True)
u'some text'
>>> soup.find('span', 'two').findNextSibling(text=True)  # This looks a bit daunting ...
u'\u0422\u0435\u043a\u0441\u0442 \u043d\u0430 \u0440\u0443\u0441\u0441\u043a\u043e\u043c'
>>> print _  # ... but it's not, really. Just Unicode chars.
Текст на русском
>>> # Then you may also wish to get things by text:
>>> print soup.find(text=u'Привет').findParent().findNextSibling(text=True)
Текст на русском
>>> # You can't get things by attributes and the contained NavigableString at the same time, though. That may be a limitation.

    At the end of that, it’s possibly worth while considering trying source.decode('cp1251') instead of source.decode('utf-8') when you’re taking it from the filesystem. lxml may actually work then.

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