Question

I’m trying to parse with lxml in python and this is my output

<td>
    <span style="display:inline">text1</span>
    <span style="display:none">text2</span>
    <span>text3</span>
    text4
</td>

Thought I was smart enough to use the following

tree = tr.xpath("//*[contains(@style,'inline')]/text()")

But then I thought I would only see text1.
What I want is to see text3 and text4 too so that the output will be

[‘text1’, ‘text3’, ‘text4’]

Can anyone send me to the right direction of doing it?

Answer 1

Explicitly exclude anything with display:none:

tree = tr.xpath("//*[not(contains(@style,'display:none'))]/text()")

That said — this is only a distant approximation of what a browser would actually do; you’d want to be driving an actual browser (as with Selenium, embedding APIs, or the like) if you required strictly accurate results.