Accessing table using splinter in Python

Question

I am trying to write a small python script that scrape tracking details for an internal system. The details are presented in a html table below. I am looking to turn it into python tuples:

(processed, unit b door 3, 30-MAY-16 12:19) (created, unit b door 2, 30-MAY-16 06:17)

for example. I am using Splinter.

<table class="resultView" cellspacing="0" rules="all" border="1" style="width:540px;border-collapse:collapse;">
    <tr class="clearHeader">
        <th align="left" scope="col">Activity</th><th scope="col">&nbsp;</th><th align="center" scope="col">Date</th>
    </tr>
    <tr class="statusRow">
        <td style="width:30%;">Processed</td>
        <td align="center"> Unit B<br /> Door 3 </td>
        <td align="center" style="width:20%;">30-May-16<br/>12:19</td>
    </tr>
    <tr class="statusAlternate">
        <td style="width:30%;">Created</td>
        <td align="center"> Unit B <br /> Door 2</td>
        <td align="center" style="width:20%;">30-May-16<br/>06:17</td>
    </tr>
</table>

If I run:

for update in browser.find_by_css('tr'):
    print update.find_by_css('td')

it displays:

[<splinter.driver.webdriver.WebDriverElement object at 0x103085e90>,  
 <splinter.driver.webdriver.WebDriverElement object at 0x103085ed0>, 
 <splinter.driver.webdriver.WebDriverElement object at 0x1030b4050>]

Which is what I would have expected. However, I cannot access the value from it. Changing the line to:

  print update.find_by_css('td').value

gives the error:

AttributeError: 'ElementList' object has no attribute 'value'

This is a list so I try to access the first element on the list with

 print update.find_by_css('td').first.value

I then get this error:

splinter.exceptions.ElementDoesNotExist: no elements could be found with css "td"

I cannot work out what I am doing wrong?

Answer 1

I think that your problem is that you are looking for "tr" or "td" into your table with css 'tr' or 'td' and any of the "tr" and/or "td" in your hable don't have this class

I suggest you to this case, use xpath to look for elements that you want to find