Xpath: why normalize-space could not remove the empty space and \n?

Question

For the following code:

<a class="title" href="the link">
Low price
<strong>computer</strong>
you should not miss
</a>

I used this xpath code to scrapy:

response.xpath('.//a[@class="title"]//text()[normalize-space()]').extract()

I got the following result:

u'\n                  \n                  Low price ', u'computer', u' you should not miss'

Why two \n and many empty spaces before low price was not removed by normalize-space() for this example?

Another question: how to combine the 3 parts as one scraped item as u'Low price computer you should not miss'?

Answer 1

Please try this:

'normalize-space(.//a[@class="title"])'