xpath confusion

Dev Community Dev/API Corner
1

I hope someone can help me… I’m confused about why this isn’t working. I am trying to use xpath and then loop thru elements to scrape info.



This works, but then I’m at a lower level node than I want:


<br />
    content = XML.ElementFromURL(pageUrl, True)<br />
    for item in content.xpath('//div[@class="column span-16 item"]/h1'):<br />
			title = item.text<br />
<br />


This doesn't work but I think it should:

<br />
    content = XML.ElementFromURL(pageUrl, True)<br />
    for item in content.xpath('//div[@class="column span-16 item"]'):<br />
			title = item.xpath('./h1').text<br />
<br />


It blows up on the ".text" for some reason. Here is the page I'm trying to parse:
[http://tekpub.com/productions?tag=free](http://tekpub.com/productions?tag=free)

For that example, the the broken code should actually be finding a title of "Concepts" for the first match. There's more I need to scape but I get the same problem for the rest as well. Any ideas what that wouldn't work?

You can see the [whole thing here](http://github.com/jcoffman/PlexTekPub) if you want/need.

Thanks in advance!
2

xpath() will always return a list, even if there’s only one item - item.xpath(’.h1’)[0].text would probably work.

3


Yay, that fixed that. Thank you. Now to get the vids to play...