如何在Xidel中更改导出变量的顺序？

Question

I am using Xidel to scrape information from webpage and I am stuck on exporting the information in a different order than it is on the page.

Example:

<tr>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td><a><font><b>{ location:=. }</b></font>{ title:=. }</a></td>
<td>{ dates:=. }</td>
<td></td>
</tr>

This code will export as title, and then subtitle. Is there any way in Xidel to change the order?

Answer 1

This may be as easy as:

xidel -q page.html -e subtitle:=//h2,title:=//h1

Something like the following (with several "-e" params) would also work, but like the previous code it will first group all subtitles and then all titles on the page, which is probably not what you want...

xidel -q page.html -e "<div><h2>{subtitle:=.}</h2></div>+" -e "<div><h1>{title:=.}</h1></div>+" 

AFAIK, in your case there's no ordering feature in Xidel. But what you CAN do is write a script wherein you save the values as env. variables with the xidel --output-format cmd (if Windows) and then (in the right order) echo/process those variables/values.

Dirkk has given a great tip (to not group), with that your line could look something like this:

xidel -q page.html --xquery "for $i in //div return (concat('sub:=',$i/h2), concat('title:=',$i/h1))"

Answer 2

I have never used this tool, but given a quick look at the documentation and seeing that it supports XQuery, the following should work I guess:

xidel -q page.html --xquery "for $div in //div return ($div/h2, $div/h1)" --output-format xml 

This assumes you have several such div elements in your page and want to sort all your titles with a subtitle first individually, ie not all subtitles first. Also, as you not have given a more specific example XML, it simply selects all divs and iterates over them - In real world HTML you probably want more characteristic features (like id attributes).