Extracting numbers from a string with xpath and python 3.6

Question

I couldn't apply the solution to similar questions I found here. After using this in visual code to scrape an web page with python and lxml

[...]
tree = html.fromstring(browser.page_source)
data = tree.xpath('//tr[@title="something"]/td[2]/text()')

if I print(data), I will get this list. Is data a list ?

['\n                    1.27\n                ', '\n                    1.81\n                ', '\n                    4.90\n                ', '\n
       2.07\n                ', '\n                    2.12\n                ']

My goal is to extract only the number from each string. I have read about a regex function, not sure if it is the solution

replace($MyString, '[^0-9]', '')

Answer 1

an easy method would be using strip(). you can scrub the list by doing something like:

clean_data = [d.strip() for d in data]

which will give you:

['1.27', '1.81', '4.90', '2.07', '2.12']

if you want these as actual ints, just use int(d.strip()) instead

Answer 2

Lets imagine that your output is stored in variable x:

>>> print("\n".join([y.strip() for y in x]))
1.27
1.81
4.90
2.07
2.12

Would this help? Or you need a list in which case:

>>> print([y.strip() for y in x])
['1.27', '1.81', '4.90', '2.07', '2.12']

[UPDATE]

As for the

Is data a list ?

How to determine a Python variable's type?