findall和xpath问题

Question

I have a text file contains some HTML code called "html.txt" as shown as below:

<tr>
    <td class="name"><a href="/player/DAVID:RD" class=""><span>David Kwan</span> (DAVID)</a></td>
    <td class="teamid" style="">DAVID:RD</td>
    <td class="">District Player</td>
    <td class="">Red-Dragon Factory</td>
</tr>

Referring to the tutorial I read from the lxml website, I tried to use the etree and findall() methods to extract the table data from the HTML code, but somehow I'm not able to print out in string format, the result I get is <Element td at 0x267c1c0> .
I understand a set or list will return similar when using the findall method, but even if I use the index 0 it also does not help. Also, using trial and error I attempted to use the str function that support the xpath to force findall return in string format also does not help.

Can someone advise me on how to correct this?

from lxml import etree

page = open("C:/Python27/project/lxml_project/html.txt").read()
x = etree.HTML(page)
element = (x.findall('.//td[@class="teamid"]'))
print(element)

My second question is if I use the xpath instead of findall method, will it be a better solution? Previously when I tried xpath, it always returned me the first search element even I have multiples of table data <td> tags in the entire html page. Is it possible to implement xpath recursively with the use of Python LXML library?

Answer 1

Use the Element.text attribute to retrieve the text content of an element:

elements = x.findall('.//td[@class="teamid"]')
print([elem.text for elem in elements])

.findall() returns a list; you can use .find() to retrieve just the first match (or None if there are no matching elements).