使用lxml检索类属性的名称

Question

I am working on a python project using lxml to scrap a page and I am having the challenge of retrieving the name of a span class attribute. The html snippet is below:

<tr class="nogrid">
  <td class="date">12th January 2016</td> 
  <td class="time">11:22pm</td> 
  <td class="category">Clothing</td>   
  <td class="product">
    <span class="brand">carlos santos</span>
  </td> 
  <td class="size">10</td> 
  <td class="name">polo</td> 
</tr>
....

How do I retrieve the value of the span's class attribute below:

<span class="brand">carlos santos</span>

Answer 1

You can use the following XPath to get class attribute of span element that is direct child of td with class product :

//td[@class="product"]/span/@class

working demo example :

from lxml import html
raw = '''<tr class="nogrid">
<td class="date">12th January 2016</td> 
<td class="time">11:22pm</td> 
<td class="category">Clothing</td>   
<td class="product">
<span class="brand">carlos santos</span>
</td> 
<td class="size">10</td> 
<td class="name">polo</td> 
</tr>'''

root = html.fromstring(raw)
span = root.xpath('//td[@class="product"]/span/@class')[0]
print span

output :

Brand

Answer 2

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

lxml = '''<tr class="nogrid">
          <td class="date">12th January 2016</td> 
          <td class="time">11:22pm</td> 
          <td class="category">Clothing</td>   
          <td class="product">
            <span class="brand">carlos santos</span>
          </td> 
          <td class="size">10</td> 
          <td class="name">polo</td> 
          <tr>'''
soup = BeautifulSoup(lxml, 'lxml')
result = soup.find('span')['class'] # result = 'brand'