XPath and html: merge tr-pairs ? (or text() thereof)

user_1050755 0
Viewed 28

Is this possible? I have a list of <tr> elements and the XPath expression //tr. Instead of returning/matching each <tr> element individually, I want to merge the first with the second, the third with the fourth, etc. Is this possible?

I'm using the lxml.html python package for html parsing and xpath evaluation.

xpath python
2 Answers

I managed to get it working for text concat():

import lxml.etree as ET
import elementpath

doc = ET.HTML("<tr><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>3</td></tr><tr><td>4</td></tr>")

for item in elementpath.select(doc, "//tr[position() mod 2 = 1]/concat(.,' => ',following-sibling::tr[1])"):
    print(item)

Output:

1 => 2
3 => 4

Still looking for a solution that merges two <td>'s into a single <tr> and returns an array of those <tr>'s with half the original length.

user_10507550

You can get two lists (odd and even) of elements with XPath expressions:

//tr[position() mod 2=1] # returns 1st, 3rd, 5th... tr node
//tr[position() mod 2=0] # returns 2nd, 4th...

and then (let say we got two lists of strings: even and odd) join each pair with Python code

for i, j in zip(even, odd):
    print(' '.join([i, j]))

This should return joined with space tr values of 1 + 2, 3 + 4, 5 + 6...

user_106822890
Related