I can not get blank text in td tag.

[pc10201]

# coding=utf-8

from parsel import Selector

html = u'''
                        <table class="table table-bordered table-hover table-condensed">
                            <thead>
                            <tr>
                                <th>#</th>
                                <th>code</th>
                                <th>vendor</th>
                                <th>name</th>
                                <th>num</th>
                            </tr>
                            </thead>
                            <tbody>
                                <tr>
                                    <th scope="row">1750</th>
                                    <td><a href="/exam/000-643">000-643</a></td>
                                    <td>IBM</td>
                                    <td></td>
                                    <td>45</td>
                                </tr>
                                </tbody>
'''

sel = Selector(text=html)
print sel.xpath('//tbody/tr//td/text()').extract()
print sel.xpath('//tbody/tr//td//text()').extract()

output

[u'000-643', u'IBM', u'45']```

[redapple]

XPath's data model does not consider "blank text" as text nodes:

A text node always has at least one character of data.

So the output of parsel seems correct to me. (And I get the same results with http://codebeautify.org/Xpath-Tester for example.)

What you could do is to loop on <td> elements and apply text() on them:

>>> sel.xpath('//tbody/tr//td/text()').extract()
[u'IBM', u'45']
>>> for td in sel.xpath('//tbody/tr//td'):
...     print(td.xpath('text()').extract())
... 
[]
[u'IBM']
[]
[u'45']
>>> 

[wsgggws]

Python3.6.7
Scrapy 1.5.1

[info.xpath('text()').extract()
      for info in response.xpath('//td').extract()]

Error:
for info in response.xpath('//td').extract()]))\nAttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'xpath'\n"

[Gallaecio]

Python3.6.7
Scrapy 1.5.1

[info.xpath('text()').extract()
      for info in response.xpath('//td').extract()]

Error:
for info in response.xpath('//td').extract()]))\nAttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'xpath'\n"

Please, instead of hijacking an unrelated Scrapy issue, ask your question in StackOverflow. It is an easy question, I bet you will get a prompt answer there.

[ilyazub]

@pc10201 s.xpath("//tbody/tr//td").xpath("normalize-space()").getall() returns None for blank text nodes. text() ignores blank text nodes as expected.

>>> s.xpath("//tbody/tr//td").xpath("normalize-space()").getall()
['000-643', 'IBM', '', '45']

Full code

from parsel import Selector

html = """
<table class="table table-bordered table-hover table-condensed">
  <thead>
    <tr>
        <th>#</th>
        <th>code</th>
        <th>vendor</th>
        <th>name</th>
        <th>num</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <th scope="row">1750</th>
      <td><a href="/exam/000-643">000-643</a></td>
      <td>IBM</td>
      <td></td>
      <td>45</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>
"""

s = Selector(text=html)

with_text = s.xpath("//tbody/tr//td//text()").getall()
with_normalize_space = s.xpath("//tbody/tr//td").xpath("normalize-space()").getall()

print(with_text, with_normalize_space)

Output

['000-643', 'IBM', '45'] ['000-643', 'IBM', '', '45']

---

I'm commenting on this old issue because I've faced it today.