[lxml-dev] how knowing the types return by .xpath

[Sergio Monteiro Basto]

On Wed, 2009-02-04 at 20:56 +0100, Stefan Behnel wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Sergio Monteiro Basto wrote:
> > Example: 
> > 
> > from lxml import etree
> > 
> > f = open(options.file).read()
> > 
> > hparser = etree.HTMLParser(encoding='utf-8', remove_comments=True)
> > etree_document = etree.HTML(f, parser=hparser)
> > 
> > elems=etree_document.xpath(strxpath)
> > 
> > for frags in elems:
> > 	print type (frags)
> > (...) 
> > 
> > if strxpath is equal //h1/following-sibling::text()
> > prints
> > <type 'lxml.etree._ElementUnicodeResult'>
> > 
> > if strxpath is equal //div[@class="news"]
> > prints 
> > <type 'lxml.etree._Element'>
> > 
> > How I do a "if" to detected the types ? 
> 
> It's actually rare that the expected type isn't known in advance, but for
> this kind of use case, you can just test the type as usual, i.e. use
> isinstance() to check for basestring, float or list.

elems (in the example) is a list and  each element of the list (elems)
could be a lxml.etree._ElementUnicodeResult or a lxml.etree._Element' 

yes ,
 isinstance(lxml.etree._ElementUnicodeResult, basestring) is true
and 
isinstance(xml.etree._Element, basestring) is false 

which resolve my initial problem 

but what instance is xml.etree._Element ? 




> 
> Stefan

Many thanks, 
-- 
Sérgio M. B.
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