Python - Can't access some tags using LXML.HTML

Question

Another day another question, sorry for all the posts. Yesterday user "JF Sebastian" gave me a great tip to use LXML.HTML instead of just using LXML only.

I am using it for another feed http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/search/tv/?q=news today but I am just not able to access a couple of tags within the content element.

Here is a sample of the feed data:

  <entry>
    <title type="text">BBC News at Six: 06/03/2013</title>
    <id>tag:feeds.bbc.co.uk,2008:PIPS:b01r27mt</id>
    <updated>2013-03-07T00:20:38Z</updated>
    <content type="html">
      &lt;p&gt;
    &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01r27mt/BBC_News_at_Six_06_03_2013/&quot;&gt;
      &lt;img src=&quot;http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/programmeimages/episode/b01r27mt_150_84.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;BBC News at Six: 06/03/2013&quot; /&gt;
    &lt;/a&gt;
      &lt;/p&gt;
      &lt;p&gt;
    National and international news stories from the BBC News team, followed by weather.
      &lt;/p&gt;
    </content>
    <category term="News" />
    <category term="TV" />
    <link rel="alternate" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01r27mt/BBC_News_at_Six_06_03_2013/" type="text/html" title="BBC News at Six: 06/03/2013">
      <media:content>
    <media:thumbnail url="http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/programmeimages/episode/b01r27mt_150_84.jpg" width="150" height="84" />
      </media:content>
    </link>
    <link rel="self" href="http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01r27mt" type="application/atom+xml" title="06/03/2013" />
    <link rel="related" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007mpkn/microsite" type="text/html" title="BBC News at Six" />
  </entry>

It appears that the tags within the content tags are text and don't get parsed correctly. Here is my code:

tree = html.parse("http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/search/tv/?q=news")
for show in tree.xpath('//entry'):
    select = lambda expr: show.cssselect(expr)[0]
    icon_url=select("thumbnail").get('url')
    print "icon_url: ", icon_url
    name=select('title').text_content()
    print "name: ", name
    stream=select('id').text_content()
    print "stream: ", stream
    date=select('updated').text_content()
    print "date: ", date
    content=select('content').text_content()
    print "content: ", content
    #links = (re.compile ('\n      <p>\n        <a href=".+?">\n          <img src="(.+?)" alt=".+?" />\n        </a>\n      </p>\n      <p>\n     ').findall(content))
    #print "links: ", links
    #short=links
    #print "short: ", short

I want to get the second p tag with the programme description into the short variable above but I don't seem to be able to select this tag using lxml and I can't get regex to work in selecting the line I want..

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You'll need to unquote that text to get html and then parse it again.

From here

from xml.sax import saxutils as su

unqoutedHtml = su.unescape(content)
newElement = html.document_fromstring(unqoutedHtml)