lookup xpath (other?) to value in html

Jason Friedman jsf80238 at gmail.com
Wed Jan 1 00:30:38 EST 2014


> For example this URL;
> http://jeffco.us/ats/displaygeneral.do?sch=001690
> The the land sqft is 11082.
> Google Chrome gives me the xpath to that data as;
> //*[@id="content"]/p[1]/table[4]/tbody/tr[2]/td[8]
>
> What I would like to do (using python) is given 11082 at what xpath can that
> be found? (may be more that one)
> The examples I can find using google refer to, given xpath what is the value
> (the opposite of what I want)

Which Chrome extension are you using to get that path?

Are you always interested in the square footage?  Here is a solution
using Beautiful Soup:

$ cat square-feet.py
#!/usr/bin/env python
import bs4
import requests
import sys
url = sys.argv[1]
request = requests.get(url)
soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(request.text)
is_sqft_mark_found, is_total_mark_found = False, False
for line in soup.get_text().splitlines():
    if line.startswith("Land Sqft"):
        is_sqft_mark_found = True
        continue
    elif is_sqft_mark_found and line.startswith("Total"):
        is_total_mark_found = True
        continue
    elif is_total_mark_found:
        print(line.strip() + " total square feet.")
        break

$ python3 square-feet.py http://jeffco.us/ats/displaygeneral.do?sch=001690
11082 total square feet.



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