Python/lxml/Xpath: How do I find the row containing certain text?

Question

Given the URL http://www.smartmoney.com/quote/FAST/?story=financials&timewindow=1&opt=YB&isFinprint=1&framework.view=smi_emptyView , how would you capture and print the contents of an entire row of data?

For example, what would it take to get an output that looked something like: "Cash & Short Term Investments 144,841 169,760 189,252 86,743 57,379"? Or something like "Property, Plant & Equipment - Gross 725,104 632,332 571,467 538,805 465,493"?

I've been introduced to the basics of Xpath through sites http://www.techchorus.net/web-scraping-lxml . However, the Xpath syntax is still largely a mystery to me.

I already have successfully done this in BeautifulSoup. I like the fact that BeautifulSoup doesn't require me to know the structure of the file - it just looks for the element containing the text I search for. Unfortunately, BeautifulSoup is too slow for a script that has to do this THOUSANDS of times. The source code for my task in BeautifulSoup is (with title_input equal to "Cash & Short Term Investments"):

    page = urllib2.urlopen (url_local)
    soup = BeautifulSoup (page)
    soup_line_item = soup.findAll(text=title_input)[0].parent.parent.parent
    list_output = soup_line_item.findAll('td') # List of elements

So what would the equivalent code in lxml be?

EDIT 1: The URLs were concealed the first time I posted. I have now fixed that.

EDIT 2: I have added my BeautifulSoup-based solution to clarify what I'm trying to do.

EDIT 3: +10 to root for your solution. For the benefit of future developers with the same question, I'm posting here a quick-and-dirty script that worked for me:

    #!/usr/bin/env python
    import urllib
    import lxml.html

    url = 'balancesheet.html'

    result = urllib.urlopen(url)
    html = result.read()


    doc = lxml.html.document_fromstring(html)
    x = doc.xpath(u'.//th[div[text()="Cash & Short Term Investments"]]/following-sibling::td/text()')
    print x

Answer 1

In [18]: doc.xpath(u'.//th[div[text()="Cash & Short Term Investments"]]/following-sibling::td/text()')
Out[18]: ['   144,841', '   169,760', '   189,252', '    86,743', '    57,379']

or you can define a little function to get the rows by text:

In [19]: def func(doc,txt):
    ...:     exp=u'.//th[div[text()="{0}"]]'\
    ...:         u'/following-sibling::td/text()'.format(txt)
    ...:     return [i.strip() for i in doc.xpath(exp)]

In [20]: func(doc,u'Total Accounts Receivable')
Out[20]: ['338,594', '270,133', '214,169', '244,940', '236,331']

or you can get all the rows to a dict :

In [21]: d={}

In [22]: for i in doc.xpath(u'.//tbody/tr'):
    ...:     if len(i.xpath(u'.//th/div/text()')):
    ...:         d[i.xpath(u'.//th/div/text()')[0]]=\
    ...:         [e.strip() for e in i.xpath(u'.//td/text()')]

In [23]: d.items()[:3]
Out[23]: 
[('Accounts Receivables, Gross',
     ['344,241', '274,894', '218,255', '247,600', '238,596']),
 ('Short-Term Investments', 
     ['27,165', '26,067', '24,400', '851', '159']),
 ('Cash & Short Term Investments',
     ['144,841', '169,760', '189,252', '86,743', '57,379'])] 

Answer 2

let html holds the html source code:

import lxm.html
doc = lxml.html.document_fromstring(html)
rows_element = doc.xpath('/html/body/div/div[2]/div/div[5]/div/div/table/tbody/tr')
for row in rows_element:
     print row.text_content()

not tested but should work

PSInstall xpath cheker or firefinder in firefox to help you with xpath