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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-03T04:08:20+00:00

The xpath for text I wish to extract is reliably located deep in the

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The xpath for text I wish to extract is reliably located deep in the tree at

...table/tbody/tr[4]/td[2]

Specifically, td[2] is structured like so

<td class="val">xyz</td>

I am trying to extract the text “xyz”, but a broad search returns multiple results. For example the following path returns 10 elements.

xpath('//td[@class="val"]')

… while a specific search doesn’t return any elements. I am unsure why the following returns nothing.

xpath('//tbody/tr/td[@class="val"]')

One solution involves..

table = root.xpath('//table[@class="123"]')

#going down the tree
xyz = table[0][3][1]
print vol.text

However, I am pretty sure this extremely brittle. I would appreciate it if someone could tell me how to construct an xpath search that would be both un-brittle and relatively cheap on resources

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You haven’t mentioned it explicitly, but if your target table and td tag classes are reliable then you could do something like:

    //table[@class="123"]/descendant::td[@class="val"]

    And you half dodge the issue of tbody being there or not.

    However, there’s no substitute for actually seeing the material you are trying to parse for recommending XPATH queries…

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