lxml: Append 'None' or Null value when html tag text content is None

Question

Trying to read a html content and extract the last table's content to an array using lxml.

Here is my last table:

<table border="1">
        <thead>
            <tr>
                <td><p>T1</p></td>
                <td><p>T2</p></td>
                <td><p>T3</p></td>
            </tr>
        </thead>
        <tbody>
            <tr>
                <td><p>A1</p></td>
                <td><p></p></td>
                <td><p>A3</p></td>
            </tr>
        </tbody>
    </table>

When i run the below code, eol_table value is ['T1', 'T2', 'T3', 'A1', 'A3'] . Its not showing the None or blank value when <p> content is blank.

Expected value is ['T1', 'T2', 'T3', 'A1', '', 'A3']. How can i get the result like this ?

Code:

eol_html_content =  urlfetch.fetch("https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7384181/Test.html").content

import lxml.html as LH
html_root = LH.fromstring(eol_html_content)

eol_table = None
for tbl in html_root.xpath('//table'):
   eol_table = tbl.xpath('.//tr/td/p/text()')

self.response.out.write(eol_table)

Answer 1

Root of your problem is, that the text() in your xpath is part of test for elements to retreive and as it is None for some p elements, it is not retreived.

The solution is to modify xpath to select all p elements and then get the text from it.

import lxml.html as LH

xmlstr = """
<table border="1">
    <thead>
        <tr>
            <td><p>T1</p></td>
            <td><p>T2</p></td>
            <td><p>T3</p></td>
        </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
        <tr>
            <td><p>A1</p></td>
            <td><p></p></td>
            <td><p>A3</p></td>
        </tr>
    </tbody>
</table>
"""

html_root = LH.fromstring(xmlstr)

eol_table = None
for tbl in html_root.xpath('//table'):
     p_elements = tbl.xpath('.//tr/td/p')
     eol_table = [p_elm.text for p_elm in p_elements]

     print eol_table

This prints:

['T1', 'T2', 'T3', 'A1', None, 'A3']

Alternative for case, where some element has no

(this updated request asked by Nijo and he also came with text_content() call)

xmlstr = """
<table border="1">
    <thead>
        <tr>
            <td><p>T1</p></td>
            <td><p>T2</p></td>
            <td><p>T3</p></td>
        </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
        <tr>
            <td><p>A1</p></td>
            <td><p></p></td>
            <td></td>
        </tr>
    </tbody>
</table>
"""
html_root = LH.fromstring(xmlstr)

eol_table = None
for tbl in html_root.xpath('//table'):
    td_elements = tbl.xpath('.//tr/td')
    eol_table = [td_elm.text_content() for td_elm in td_elements]
    print eol_table

what prints

['T1', 'T2', 'T3', 'A1', '', '']

As you see, text_content() never returns None but in None cases returns empty string ''