xpath function / metadata agent

Dev Community Dev/API Corner
1

Hi,



Trying to develop a metadata agent for retrieving subtitles from Addict7ed.com and I don’t know a thing about Python and have been struggling to strip a page down of all unwanted elements using xpath



<br />
elem = HTML.ElementFromURL(searchURL)<br />
alltext = elem.xpath(".//*[@id='container95m']/table/tbody/tr[2]/td[2]/table/tbody/tr[*]/td[*]")<br />
for item in alltext:<br />
 Log("text = %s" % item)


Running this xpath against a query checker just scraps everything that I want.
Still, it seems like "alltext" list is empty. Sometimes, I do get some results by playing around the query but I cannot get the HTML code behind it to parse it and do whatever I want with it because it would simply displays "Element xxx at xxxxx"

Some help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
2

Hi,



Can you paste the full code, with the python import statements etc and the URL populated?

3

You can test your xpath queries in chrome. Simply go to the page you are parsing, open console, and type



$x(’.//[@id=“container95m”]/table/tbody/tr[2]/td[2]/table/tbody/tr[]/td’);



this will run the given xpath query and return the results. priceless for quick debugging of your xpath syntax.

4

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