Question

I have to parse some HTML. However, it is malformed.. as you can see the text “Cowabunga” is not in contained in any HTML element.

from lxml.html import fromstring
from lxml.cssselect import CSSSelector

stuff = '''<p>
                <span id="alpha" style="color: #999; "></span> 
                <span id="bravo" style="color: #999; "></span> 
                Cowabunga  
            </p>'''

l = CSSSelector ("p")

e = l(fromstring(stuff))
print e[0].text

How can I use lxml/Python to write a CSSSelector to locate this text?

Thanks

Edit: The code above gives blank output – just a row of spaces – I need to catch “Cowabunga”

Answer 1

This is mixed content so it’s always a little rough. e[0].text_content() will get all of the text in your example.