Xpath in python not getting data

Question

I'm trying to request data from wikipedia in python using xpath. I'm getting an empty list. What am I doing wrong.

import requests

from lxml import html

pageContent=requests.get(
     'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_medalists_in_judo'
)

tree = html.fromstring(pageContent.content)

name = tree.xpath('//*[@id="mw-content-text"]/div/table[1]/tbody/tr[2]/td[2]/a[1]/text()')

print name

eLRuLL · Accepted Answer · 2017-12-27 19:44:19Z

2

This is a very common mistake when trying to get the xpath from the browser and the table tags, as the browser is the one that normally adds the tbody tag inside of them, which doesn't actually exist inside the response body.

So just remove it and it should be like:

'//*[@id="mw-content-text"]/div/table[1]//tr[2]/td[2]/a[1]/text()'

answered Dec 27, 2017 at 19:44

eLRuLL

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2 Comments

Tarik Koric Over a year ago

Awsome that worked thanks, what about something like this bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=btc-nxt. Im trying to get the xpath data for the price in dollars //*[@id="rowChart"]/div[2]/div/div[2]/div/div[2]/span/text(). But its also giving me a blank value

eLRuLL Over a year ago

@TarikKoric that's a totally different question and a total different case, first is it protected by cloudflare so getting any kind of data from that site will be extremely difficult and also looks like the entire site is generated dynamically with javascript, so a normal request won't work.

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