Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@AlexanderMike

AlexanderMike/lxml_test.py

Created February 17, 2016 21:29
Show Gist options

  • Select an option

    Learn more about clone URLs
  • Save AlexanderMike/9e5855f1ae81da491c7d to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.

Select an option

Learn more about clone URLs
Save AlexanderMike/9e5855f1ae81da491c7d to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Download ZIP
Testing LXML parsing in Python for espn.com, MLB 2015 standings
Raw
lxml_test.py
'''Notes from an experiment in XML using Windows 7 and Python 2.7 trying to
follow example from:
http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/scenarios/scrape/#.
1) to get lxml on Windows machine had to install wheel file for libxml2.dll as
pip install failed repeatedly (also Visual C++ 9.0)
2) The tried to parse MLB 2015 stats from this page:
http://espn.go.com/mlb/standings/_/group/overall
where xpath was //*[@id="main-container"]/div/section/div[2]/div/div[2]/table/tbody/tr[1]/td[2]
however, this failed because browser xpath is not raw, and browser inserted a tbody where none existed in
source code. Therefore, my queries failed until I went element by element!'''
import requests
from lxml import html
page = requests.get('http://espn.go.com/mlb/standings/_/group/overall')
tree = html.fromstring(page.content)
standings = tree.xpath('//*[@id="main-container"]/div/section/div[2]/div/div[2]/table/tr[1]/td[1]/a/span/abbr/text()')
#['STL']
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment