So in my scrapy project I was able to isolate some particular fields, one of the field return something like:

[Rank Info] on 2013-06-27 14:26 Read 174 Times

which was selected by expression:

(//td[@class="show_content"]/text())[4]

I usually do post-processing to extract the datetime information, i.e., 2013-06-27 14:26 Now since I've learned a little more on the xpath substring manipulation, I am wondering if it is even possible to extract that piece of information in the first place, i.e., in the xpath expression itself?

Thanks,