Python lxml - returns null list

Posted by Chris Finlayson on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Chris Finlayson
Published on 2014-08-18T15:55:11Z Indexed on 2014/08/18 16:22 UTC
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I cannot figure out what is wrong with the XPATH when trying to extract a value from a webpage table. The method seems correct as I can extract the page title and other attributes, but I cannot extract the third value, it always returns an empty list?

from lxml import html
import requests

test_url = 'SC312226'

page = ('https://www.opencompany.co.uk/company/'+test_url)

print 'Now searching URL: '+page

data = requests.get(page)
tree = html.fromstring(data.text)

print tree.xpath('//title/text()') # Get page title  
print tree.xpath('//a/@href') # Get href attribute of all links  
print tree.xpath('//*[@id="financial"]/table/tbody/tr/td[1]/table/tbody/tr[2]/td[1]/div[2]/text()')

Unless i'm missing something, it would appear the XPATH is correct:

Chrome screenshot

I checked Chrome console, appears ok! So i'm at a loss

$x ('//*[@id="financial"]/table/tbody/tr/td[1]/table/tbody/tr[2]/td[1]/div[2]/text()')
[
"£432,272"
]

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