Question

With lxml.html, how do I access single elements without using a for loop?

This is the HTML:

<tr class="headlineRow">
  <td>
    <span class="headline">This is some awesome text</span>
  </td>
</tr>

For example, this will fail with IndexError:

 for row in doc.cssselect('tr.headlineRow'):
     headline = row.cssselect('td span.headline')
     print headline[0]

This will pass:

 for row in doc.cssselect('tr.headlineRow'):
     headline = row.cssselect('td span.headline')
     for first_thing in headline:
         print headline[0].text_content()

Answer 1

I tried out your example using CSSSelector and headline[0] worked fine. See below:

>>> html  ="""<tr class="headlineRow">
  <td>
    <span class="headline">This is some awesome text</span>
  </td>
</tr>"""
>>> from lxml import etree
>>> from lxml.cssselect import CSSSelector
>>> doc = etree.fromstring(html)
>>> sel1 = CSSSelector('tr.headlineRow')
>>> sel2 = CSSSelector('td span.headline')
>>> for row in sel1(doc):
    headline = sel2(row)
    print headline[0]

<Element span at 8f31e3c>