XPather paths not working
If you’ve ever had to page scrape any crappy sites (i.e you can’t use CSS selectors because there isn’t any) you’ve probably ended up using XPath, and the easiest way to find those XPath expressions is to use the XPather extension for firefox. And once you’ve got to an expression that involves tables, you’ve probably ended up wondering why it didn’t work. I certainly have, repeatedly, and end up finding the solution again and having a duh, I know this moment. In order to avoid this, here’s the explanation: Firefox inserts TBody tags into the rendered HTML even if they don’t exist in the source, and this is the HTML XPather is working against So the solution? Remove the tbody tags, and you should be right to go.
