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Asked: 2026-06-05T21:33:10+00:00

team = hxs.select (‘//table[@class=tablehead/tbody/tr[contains[.@class, player]’) The structure of the web site I whose table

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team = hxs.select (‘//table[@class=”tablehead”/tbody/tr[contains[.@class, “player”]’)

The structure of the web site I whose table I want to select is as follows:

<html>
 <body>
  <table>
   <tbody>
    <tr>
     <td>...</td>
     <td>...</td>
       ...
    </tr>
   </tbody>
  </table>
 </body>
</html>

Since there are multiple tables in the web site, I only want to select the one whose class is defined as “tablehead”. Also, for that table, I only want to select the tags whose class attributes contain the string “player”. My attempt above looks a bit spotty to begin with. I tried running the crawler, and it says that the line I produced above is an invalid xpath line. Any advice would be nice.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    //table[@class=”tablehead”/tbody/tr[contains[.@class, “player”]

    Correcting this results in:

    //table[@class='tablehead']/tbody/tr[contains(@class, 'player')]

    This selects every tr the string value of whose class attribute contains the string "player" and that (the tr) is a child of a tbody that is a child of any table in the XML document, whose class attribute has string value "tablehead" .

    XSLT – based verification:

    <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>
 <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

 <xsl:template match="/">
   <xsl:copy-of select=
    "//table[@class='tablehead']
        /tbody/tr[contains(@class, 'player')]
    "/>
 </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

    When this transformation is applied on the provided XML document (made just a little bit more realistic):

    <html>
    <body>
        <table class="tablehead">
            <tbody>
                <tr class="major-player">
                    <td>player1</td>
                    <td>player2</td>
                </tr>
            </tbody>
        </table>
    </body>
</html>

    the Xpath expression is evaluated and the selected nodes (just one in this case) are copied to the output:

    <tr class="major-player">
   <td>player1</td>
   <td>player2</td>
</tr>
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