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htmlpython-3.xselenium-webdriverparsel

Bypass em tags when extracting contents of class name using Parsel selector


I'm trying to extract the contents of the class name. How to do I extract all the contents including the ones inside the 'em' tags and after the 'em' tags too? See picture below:

enter image description here I tried the following and these were the results:

Trial 1:

driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)
sel = Selector(text = driver.page_source)
sel.xpath("//*[@class ='st']").extract()

Output 1:

>> <span class="st"><span class="f">Nov 26, 2018 - </span>First #<em>GDPR fine</em> awarded in Germany. 330,000 user data stolen. Usernames and passwords stored in plaintext. €20,000 <em>fine</em>. Why "so low"?</span>

Trial 2:

driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)
sel = Selector(text = driver.page_source)
sel.xpath("//*[@class ='st']/text()").extract()

Output 2:

>> First #

Ideally, the output I want to get is:

>> Nov 26, 2018 - First #GDPR fine awarded in Germany. 330,000 user data stolen. Usernames and passwords stored in plaintext. €20,000 fine. Why "so low"?

Solution

  • I eventually found a way to solve the problem though not an elegant one, would still welcome a more elegant solution.

    I pulled in the contents of the class name using:

     driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)
     sel = Selector(text = driver.page_source)
     content = sel.xpath("//*[@class ='st']").extract()
    

    I then defined a function that stripped the html away from the text:

    import html.parser
    
    class HTMLTextExtractor(html.parser.HTMLParser):
        def __init__(self):
            super(HTMLTextExtractor, self).__init__()
            self.result = [ ]
    
        def handle_data(self, d):
           self.result.append(d)
    
        def get_text(self):
           return ''.join(self.result)
    
        def html_to_text(html):
            s = HTMLTextExtractor()
            s.feed(html)
            return s.get_text()
    

    Looping through the contents in the list and stripping the html one at a time gave me the result I wanted:

      m = []
      for w in content:
          z = html_to_text(w)
          m.append(z)