How to find text's Parent Node?

Question

If I use:

import requests
from lxml import html

response = request.get(url='someurl')
tree = html.document_fromstring(response.text)


all_text = tree.xpath('//text()')     # which give all text from page

Inside this all_text list we have all the text from page. Now I want to know if:

text_searched = all_text[all_text.index('any string which is in all_text list')]

Is it possible to get to the web element of the text been searched?

Answer 1

You can use getparent() method for this purpose, for example :

.....
.....
all_text = tree.xpath('//text()')

first_text = all_text[0]
parent_element = first_text.getparent()

print html.tostring(parent_element)

---

Note that the behavior of getparent() might not be the one you expected in case current text element located after element node in the same parent element. Due to the tree model implemented by lxml, the text is considered tail of the preceding element instead of child of the containing element in this case, so getparent() will return the preceding element. See example below to get a clear idea of what I've been talking about :

from lxml import html
raw = '''<div>
    <span>foo</span>
    bar
</div>'''
root = html.fromstring(raw)
texts = root.xpath('//text()[normalize-space()]')
print [t for t in texts]
# output : ['foo', '\n\tbar\n']

[html.tostring(e.getparent()) for e in texts]
# output : ['<span>foo</span>\n\tbar\n', '<span>foo</span>\n\tbar\n']
# see that calling getparent() on 'bar' returns the <span> not the <div>