Behavior of the scrapy xpath selector on h1-h6 tags
Question
Why does the following two code snippets give different outputs? The only difference between them is that the h1 tag in the first case is replaced with an h tag in the second case. Is this because the h1 tag has a special "meaning" in html? I tried with h1 through h6 and all of them give [] as output, while with h7 it starts to give [u'xxx'] as output.
from scrapy import Selector # scrapy version: 1.2.2
text = '<h1><p>xxx</p></h1>'
print Selector(text=text).xpath('//h1/p/text()').extract()
Output[1]: []
text = '<h><p>xxx</p></h>'
print Selector(text=text).xpath('//h/p/text()').extract()
Output[2]: [u'xxx']
2 answers
solution1
3 ACCPTED 2016-12-09 15:55:59
Including p tags inside h# is invalid according to W3C. You can see more about this here
Anyway, to bypass this and just work with any xml structure you can just change the type like this:
sel = Selector(text="anyxml", type="xml")
This will respect any xml structure.
solution2
1 2016-12-09 15:55:09
Short answer is that h1 .. h6 should not contain <p> in well-formed HTML documents, at least lxml (which powers Scrapy Selectors) does not like that when parsing HTML. lxml does handle bad formatting, but this case it a bit different.
You can check how lxml parses and serializes back the HTML snippet:
>>> from scrapy import Selector
>>> text = '<h1><p>xxx</p></h1>'
>>> s = Selector(text=text)
>>> print(s.extract())
<html><body><h1></h1><p>xxx</p></body></html>
So when lxml encounters the p tag within the h1 , it puts it after it. The p element is not lost, but it's not where you'd expect it when reading the HTML source.
vs the other snippet:
>>> text = '<h><p>xxx</p></h>'
>>> s = Selector(text=text)
>>> print(s.extract())
<html><body><h><p>xxx</p></h></body></html>
>>>
h elements do not mean anything special for lxml, so " p within h " is ok .
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