How to use regular expression in lxml xpath?

Question

I\'m using construction like this:

doc = parse(url).getroot()
links = doc.xpath(\"//a[text()=\'some text\']\")

But I need to select all lin

Answer 1

Because I can't stand lxml's approach to namespaces, I wrote a little method that you cam bind to the HtmlElement class.

Just import HtmlElement:

from lxml.etree import HtmlElement

Then put this in your file:

# Patch the HtmlElement class to add a function that can handle regular
# expressions within XPath queries.
def re_xpath(self, path):
    return self.xpath(path, namespaces={
        're': 'http://exslt.org/regular-expressions'})
HtmlElement.re_xpath = re_xpath

And then when you want to make a regular expression query, just do:

my_node.re_xpath("//a[re:match(text(), 'some text')]")

And you're off to the races. With a little more work, you could probably modify this to replace the xpath method itself, but I haven't bothered since this is working well enough.