How to find direct children of element in lxml

Question

I found an object with specific class:

THREAD = TREE.find_class(\'thread\')[0]

Now I want to get all

elements that a

Answer 1

Try this XPath expression:

//p[parent::div[@class='thread']]

Or in a complete Python expression:

THREAD.xpath("//p[parent::div[@class='thread']]")

The other (inverse) approach is this XPath expression:

div[@class='thread']/child::p"

which uses the direct child:: axis and only selects the direct child nodes.

Summary:
Which one of both expressions is faster depends on the XPath compiler. child:: is the default axis and is used if no other axis is given.

---

FYI: XPath counting starts at 1 and not 0.
So concerning your XML example, the following expression

count(//div[@class='thread'][1]/child::p)

does result in a value of 2 - the result of counting

+

.