<!DOCTYPE html><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="pc chrome win psc_dir-ltr psc_form-xlarge" dir="ltr" lang="en">
<title>Some Title</title>
</html>
if I run:
from lxml import etree
html = etree.parse('text.txt')
result = html.xpath('//title')
print(result)
I will get an empty list. I guess it has something to do with namespace, but I can't figure it out how to fix it.
You can use the namespaces parameter of the xpath method like this:
from lxml import etree
html = etree.parse('text.txt')
result = html.xpath('//n:title', namespaces = {'n': 'http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'})
According to the lxml documentation "[...] XPath does not have a notion of a default namespace. The empty prefix is therefore undefined for XPath and cannot be used in namespace prefix mappings", so if you are working with an element that has a default namespace you can explicitly define the namespace when calling xpath.
For more information see this similar question with a great answer.