Question

 s = """
      <tbody>
      <tr>
       <td style="border-bottom: none">
       <span class="graytext" style="font-weight: bold;"> Reply #3 - </span>
        <span class="graytext" style="font-size: 11px">
        05/13/09  2:02am
        <br>
       </span>
      </td>
     </tr>
    </tbody>
 """

In the HTML string I need to take out the date string.

I tried in this way

  import lxml
  doc = lxml.html.fromstring(s)
  doc.xpath('//span[@class="graytext" and @style="font-size: 11px"]')

But this is not working. I should have to take only the Datestring.

Answer 1

Your query is selecting the span, you need to grab the text from it:

>>> doc.xpath('//span[@class="graytext" and @style="font-size: 11px"]')
[<Element span at 1c9d4c8>]

Most queries return a sequence, I normally use a helper function that gets the first item.

from lxml import etree
s = """
<tbody>
 <tr>
   <td style="border-bottom: none">
   <span class="graytext" style="font-weight: bold;"> Reply #3 - </span>
    <span class="graytext" style="font-size: 11px">
    05/13/09  2:02am
    <br>
   </span>
  </td>
 </tr>
</tbody>
"""
doc = etree.HTML(s)

def first(sequence,default=None):
  for item in sequence:
    return item
  return default

Then:

>>> doc.xpath('//span[@class="graytext" and @style="font-size: 11px"]')
[<Element span at 1c9d4c8>]
>>> doc.xpath('//span[@class="graytext" and @style="font-size: 11px"]/text()')
['\n    05/13/09  2:02am\n    ']
>>> first(doc.xpath('//span[@class="graytext" and @style="font-size: 11px"]/text()'),'').strip()
'05/13/09  2:02am'