Quick little script to test an XCode expression against an HTML file, using Scrapy's XPath selector. This is by no means the best or most direct way to test an XPath expression.

gistfile1.py

from scrapy.http import TextResponse
from scrapy.selector import HtmlXPathSelector

XPATH_TO_TEST = "//img/@src"
FILE_TO_TEST_AGAINST = "pathtest.html"

f = open(FILE_TO_TEST_AGAINST, 'r')
test_html = f.read()

response = TextResponse('http://www.example.com', status=200, headers=[], body=test_html)

hxs = HtmlXPathSelector(response)
imgs = hxs.select(XPATH_TO_TEST).extract()

print imgs

f.close()