You're not going to find it in the lxml documentation because it's basic
xpath semantics, `/` at the start of the path means the path is absolute
and thus the search is anchored to the document root:
https://www.w3.org/TR/xpath-10/#location-paths:~:text=An%20absolute%20location%20path
> An absolute location path consists of / optionally followed by a
relative location path. A / by itself selects the root node of the
document containing the context node. If it is followed by a relative
location path, then the location path selects the set of nodes that
would be selected by the relative location path relative to the root
node of the document containing the context node.
To search within the context node (the node from which you're invoking
`xpath`) you can:
- use `self::node()` or `.` (an abbreviation for the former) as the
leading step
- or follow the descendant (or descendant-or-self) axis explicitly e.g.
`descendant::table` should have the same effect as `.//table`
On 16/02/2026 16:15, lord of edges via lxml - The Python XML Toolkit wrote:
Will start by saying I am sure this is documented somehow and I probably just
don't know the right word to find that documentation.
I'm trying to query a table from a document, after which I will query details
from that table. The issue I have is that the second xpath query is pulling
results from the entire document.
As an example, I have:
```
from lxml import html
exampledocument="""
<head>
example
</head>
<body>
<table><tbody>
<tr><th>exampleCellNotToFind</th>
</tbody></table>
<table id="exampleTableToFind"><tbody>
<tr><th>exampleCellToFind</th>
</tbody></table>
</body>
"""
example=html.fromstring(exampledocument)
xpath1=example.xpath('//table[@id="exampleTableToFind"]', smart_strings=False)
xpath2=xpath1[0].xpath('//table', smart_strings=False)
xpath3=html.fromstring(html.tostring(xpath1[0])).xpath('//table',
smart_strings=False)
```
In this case, xpath2 includes both tables (xpath1 only includes 1 table), and I don't
understand why. From reading "XPath return values" section of
https://lxml.de/xpathxslt.html#xpath I thought smart_strings=True would the reason, but
setting it to false didn't seem to change the output as far as I can tell.
I do have a workable solution in this html.fromstring(html.tostring()), but
thought I should ask here to try to understand how these element type variables
are working.
Thanks, for any help.
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