Question

This is my html tree

 <li class="taf"><h3><a href="26eOfferCode%3DGSONESTP-----------" id="pa1">
    Citibank <b>Credit Card</b> - Save over 5% on fuel | Citibank.co.in</a>
   </h3>Get the IndianOil Citibank <b>Card</b>. Apply Now! 
   <br />
   <a href="e%253DGOOGLE ------">Get 10X Rewards On Shopping</a> -
   <a href="S%2526eOfferCode%253DGSCCSLEX ------">Save Over 5% On Fuel</a>
   <br />
   <cite>www.citibank.co.in/<b>CreditCards</b></cite>
</li>

From this html i need to extract the lines beforeth of < br > tag

line1 : Get the IndianOil Citibank Card. Apply Now!

line2 : Get 10X Rewards On Shopping – Save Over 5% On Fuel

how it would supposed to do in python?

Answer 1

I think you just asked for the line before each <br/>.

This following code will do it for the sample you’ve provided, by striping out the <b> and <a> tags and printing the .tail of each element whose following-sibling is a <br/>.

from lxml import etree

doc = etree.HTML("""
<li class="taf"><h3><a href="26eOfferCode%3DGSONESTP-----------" id="pa1">
    Citibank <b>Credit Card</b> - Save over 5% on fuel | Citibank.co.in</a>
   </h3>Get the IndianOil Citibank <b>Card</b>. Apply Now! 
   <br />
   <a href="e%253DGOOGLE ------">Get 10X Rewards On Shopping</a> -
   <a href="S%2526eOfferCode%253DGSCCSLEX ------">Save Over 5% On Fuel</a>
   <br />
   <cite>www.citibank.co.in/<b>CreditCards</b></cite>
</li>""")

etree.strip_tags(doc,'a','b')

for element in doc.xpath('//*[following-sibling::*[name()="br"]]'):
  print repr(element.tail.strip())

Yields:

'Get the IndianOil Citibank Card. Apply Now!'
'Get 10X Rewards On Shopping -\n   Save Over 5% On Fuel'