Question

See this html

<div>
    <p>
    <span class="abc">Monitor</span> <b>$300</b>
    </p>
    <a href="/add">Add to cart</a>
</div>
<div>
    <p>
    <span class="abc">Keyboard</span> $20 
    </p>
    <a href="/add">Add to cart</a>
</div>

Using xpath I want to parse Monitor $300 and Keyboard $20. I use this xpath

 //div[a[contains(., "Add to cart")]]/p/text()

But it selects <span class="abc">Monitor</span> <b>$300</b>. I don’t want the tags. How do I get only the text?

Answer 1

You want to select all descendant text, not just child text:

//div[a[contains(., "Add to cart")]]/p//text()

Note the double slash between p and text() there.

This potentially will also include a lot of inter-tag whitespace though, you you’ll need to clean that up. Example using lxml:

>>> import lxml.etree as ET
>>> tree = ET.fromstring('''<div>
... <div>
...     <p>
...     <span class="abc">Monitor</span> <b>$300</b>
...     </p>
...     <a href="/add">Add to cart</a>
... </div>
... <div>
...     <p>
...     <span class="abc">Keyboard</span> $20 
...     </p>
...     <a href="/add">Add to cart</a>
... </div>
... </div>''')
>>> tree.xpath('//div[a[contains(., "Add to cart")]]/p//text()')
['\n    ', 'Monitor', ' ', '$300', '\n    ', '\n    ', 'Keyboard', ' $20 \n    ']
>>> res = _
>>> [txt for txt in (txt.strip() for txt in res) if txt]
['Monitor', '$300', 'Keyboard', '$20']