can we use xpath with BeautifulSoup?

问题:

I am using BeautifulSoup to scrape a url and I had the following code

import urllib
import urllib2
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

url =  "http://www.example.com/servlet/av/ResultTemplate=AVResult.html"
req = urllib2.Request(url)
response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
the_page = response.read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(the_page)
soup.findAll('td',attrs={'class':'empformbody'})

Now in the above code we can use findAll to get tags and information related to them, but I want to use xpath. Is it possible to use xpath with BeautifulSoup? If possible, can anyone please provide me an example code so that it will be more helpful?

回答1:

Nope, BeautifulSoup, by itself, does not support XPath expressions.

An alternative library, lxml, does support XPath 1.0. It has a BeautifulSoup compatible mode where it'll try and parse broken HTML the way Soup does. However, the default lxml HTML parser does just as good a job of parsing broken HTML, and I believe is faster.

Once you've parsed your document into an lxml tree, you can use the .xpath() method to search for elements.

import urllib2
from lxml import etree

url =  "http://www.example.com/servlet/av/ResultTemplate=AVResult.html"
response = urllib2.urlopen(url)
htmlparser = etree.HTMLParser()
tree = etree.parse(response, htmlparser)
tree.xpath(xpathselector)

Of possible interest to you is the CSS Selector support; the CSSSelector class translates CSS statements into XPath expressions, making your search for td.empformbody that much easier:

from lxml.cssselect import CSSSelector

td_empformbody = CSSSelector('td.empformbody')
for elem in td_empformbody(tree):
    # Do something with these table cells.

Coming full circle: BeautifulSoup itself does have pretty decent CSS selector support:

for cell in soup.select('table#foobar td.empformbody'):
    # Do something with these table cells.

回答2:

I can confirm that there is no XPath support within Beautiful Soup.

回答3:

Martijn's code no longer works properly (it is 4+ years old by now...), the etree.parse() line prints to the console and doesn't assign the value to the tree variable. Referencing this, I was able to figure out this works using requests and lxml:

from lxml import html
import requests

page = requests.get('http://econpy.pythonanywhere.com/ex/001.html')
tree = html.fromstring(page.content)
#This will create a list of buyers:
buyers = tree.xpath('//div[@title="buyer-name"]/text()')
#This will create a list of prices
prices = tree.xpath('//span[@class="item-price"]/text()')

print 'Buyers: ', buyers
print 'Prices: ', prices

回答4:

BeautifulSoup has a function named findNext from current element directed childern,so:

father.findNext('div',{'class':'class_value'}).findNext('div',{'id':'id_value'}).findAll('a') 

Above code can imitate the following xpath:

div[class=class_value]/div[id=id_value]

回答5:

I've searched through their docs and it seems there is not xpath option. Also, as you can see here on a similar question on SO, the OP is asking for a translation from xpath to BeautifulSoup, so my conclusion would be - no, there is no xpath parsing available.

回答6:

This is a pretty old thread, but there is a work-around solution now, which may not have been in BeautifulSoup at the time.

Here is an example of what I did. I use the "requests" module to read an RSS feed and get its text content in a variable called "rss_text". With that, I run it thru BeautifulSoup, search for the xpath /rss/channel/title, and retrieve its contents. It's not exactly XPath in all its glory (wildcards, multiple paths, etc.), but if you just have a basic path you want to locate, this works.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
rss_obj = BeautifulSoup(rss_text, 'xml')
cls.title = rss_obj.rss.channel.title.get_text()

回答7:

when you use lxml all simple:

tree = lxml.html.fromstring(html)
i_need_element = tree.xpath('//a[@class="shared-components"]/@href')

but when use BeautifulSoup BS4 all simple too:

• first remove "//" and "@"
• second - add star before "="

try this magic:

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "lxml")
i_need_element = soup.select ('a[class*="shared-components"]')

as you see, this does not support sub-tag, so i remove "/@href" part