Extract text inside anchor tag using xpath - xpath

Question

I am trying to ascertain how many pages are there for any search result on a site so that i can scrape data for all the pages using lxml and xpath.
There is a pagination tab with the following structure:
Page: 1 2 3 ... 7 next
the html content for the same being something like
<ul class="ulclass">
<li></li>
<li>
<span> You are on the first page</span>
"1"
</li>
<li>
<a href="link to second page">
<span></span>
"2"
</a>
</li>
<li>
</li>
...
<li>
<a href="link to last page">
<span></span>
"7"
</a>
</li>
My approach is to extract the page numbers 1,2,3,7 so that i can repeat the web scraping 7 times for every page 'cause otherwise it just scrapes the first result of the page.
I have written the following xpath, but it doesnot return correct page numbers.
xpath('//ul[#class="ulclass"]/li/a/text())

Answer 1

If I expand your example to form this,
<ul class="ulclass">
<li><span>You are on the first page</span>"1"</li>
<li><span></span>"2"</li>
<li><span></span>"3"</li>
<li><span></span>"4"</li>
<li><span></span>"5"</li>
<li><span></span>"6"</li>
<li><span></span>"7"</li>
</ul>
then using scrapy in Python I can get this:
>>> from scrapy.selector import Selector
>>> selector = Selector(text=open('temp.htm').read())
>>> selector.xpath('..//ul[#class="ulclass"]/li/a/text()').extract()
['"2"', '"3"', '"4"', '"5"', '"6"', '"7"']