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removes weird indentation in the shell results
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eliasdorneles authored and dangra committed Aug 8, 2014
1 parent 65c8f05 commit 1ca489d
Showing 1 changed file with 7 additions and 7 deletions.
14 changes: 7 additions & 7 deletions docs/topics/selectors.rst
Expand Up @@ -439,26 +439,26 @@ Example::
Converting a *node-set* to string::

>>> sel.xpath('//a//text()').extract() # take a peek at the node-set
[u'Click here to go to the ', u'Next Page']
[u'Click here to go to the ', u'Next Page']
>>> sel.xpath("string(//a[1]//text())").extract() # convert it to string
[u'Click here to go to the ']
[u'Click here to go to the ']

A *node* converted to a string, however, puts together the text of itself plus of all its descendants::

>>> sel.xpath("//a[1]").extract() # select the first node
[u'<a href="#">Click here to go to the <strong>Next Page</strong></a>']
[u'<a href="#">Click here to go to the <strong>Next Page</strong></a>']
>>> sel.xpath("string(//a[1])").extract() # convert it to string
[u'Click here to go to the Next Page']
[u'Click here to go to the Next Page']

So, using the ``.//text()`` node-set won't select anything in this case::

>>> sel.xpath("//a[contains(.//text(), 'Next Page')]").extract()
[]
[]

But using the ``.`` to mean the node, works::

>>> sel.xpath("//a[contains(., 'Next Page')]").extract()
[u'<a href="#">Click here to go to the <strong>Next Page</strong></a>']
[u'<a href="#">Click here to go to the <strong>Next Page</strong></a>']

.. _`XPath string function`: http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath/#section-String-Functions

Expand Down Expand Up @@ -524,7 +524,7 @@ you can just select by class using CSS and then switch to XPath when needed::
>>> from scrapy import Selector
>>> sel = Selector(text='<div class="hero shout"><time datetime="2014-07-23 19:00">Special date</time></div>')
>>> sel.css('.shout').xpath('./time/@datetime').extract()
[u'2014-07-23 19:00']
[u'2014-07-23 19:00']

This is cleaner than using the verbose XPath trick shown above. Just remember
to use the ``.`` in the XPath expressions that will follow.
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