python/xpath question..

[bruce]

morning....

i apologize up front as this is really more of an xpath question..

in my python, i'm using the xpath function to iterate/parse some html. i can
do something like

s=d.xpath("//tr/td/text()")
count=len(s)

and get the number of nodes that have text

i can then do something like
s=d.xpath("//tr/td")
count2=len(s)

and get the number of total nodes...
by subtracting, i can get the number of nodes, without text.. is there an
easier way??!!
count2-count

ie, if i have something like
<tr>
<td></td>
<td>foo</td>
</tr>

is there a way to get the count that there is a single "td" node with
text()=""

thanks

[Stefan Behnel]

Re: python/xpath question..

Hi,

you should really read about XPath. There are also newsgroups specifically for
this topic, please use them.


bruce wrote:

in my python, i'm using the xpath function to iterate/parse some html. i can
do something like
>
s=d.xpath("//tr/td/text()")
count=len(s)
>
and get the number of nodes that have text

That is a wrong assumption. It will give you the number of text nodes, not the
number of elements. They may or may not be the same.

i can then do something like
s=d.xpath("//tr/td")
count2=len(s)
>
and get the number of total nodes...
by subtracting, i can get the number of nodes, without text.. is there an
easier way??!!

Yes, learn to use XPath, e.g.

//tr/td[not string()]

Stefan

[Stefan Behnel]

Re: python/xpath question..

Stefan Behnel wrote:

Yes, learn to use XPath, e.g.
>
//tr/td[not string()]

Oh, well...

//tr/td[not(string())]

as I said, wrong news group. ;-)

Try something like "gmane.text.xml .xpath.general" , for example.

Stefan