How To Add Non-ascii Characters In Xpath, In Scrappy

I have the following Xpath: bathroom = response.xpath(“.//div[1][contains(., 'Baños’)]/text()').extract_first() And I get this error: ValueError: All strings must be XML comp

Solution 1:

Besides the literal Baños, your code snippet contains invalid literal string delimiter (both single and double quotes) which will cause a different error :

bathroom = response.xpath(“.//div[1][contains(., 'Baños’)]/text()").extract_first()
                          ^                            ^

Converting the entire XPath expression to unicode, as suggested in the 2nd link, and fixing the two quotes pointed above should fix the initial errors. Below as a quick test using lxml (which scrapy uses under the hood) :

>>>from lxml import etree>>>root = etree.fromstring('<root/>')>>>root.xpath(u".//div[1][contains(., 'Baños')]/text()")
[]