CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonhtmlstring
user1401233
user1401233

Reputation: 21

How can I extract certain information from a string in python?

I am trying to use python to extract certain information from html code. for example:

<a href="#tips">Visit the Useful Tips Section</a> 
and I would like to get result : Visit the Useful Tips Section

<div id="menu" style="background-color:#FFD700;height:200px;width:100px;float:left;">
<b>Menu</b><br />
HTML<br />
CSS<br />
and I would like to get Menu HTML CSS

In other word, I wish to get everything between <>and<> I am trying to write a python function that takes the html code as a string, and then extract information from there. I am stuck at string.split('<').

Upvotes: 1

Views: 144

Answers (5)

Pamela McA&#39;Nulty
Pamela McA&#39;Nulty

Reputation: 306

I'd use BeautifulSoup - it gets much less cranky with mal-formed html.

Upvotes: 0

RanRag
RanRag

Reputation: 49547

You can use lxml html parser.

>>> import lxml.html as lh
>>> st = ''' load your above html content into a string '''
>>> d = lh.fromstring(st)
>>> d.text_content()

'Visit the Useful Tips Section \nand I would like to get result : Visit the Useful Tips Section\n\n\nMenu\nHTML\nCSS\nand I would
like to get Menu HTML CSS\n'

or you can do 

>>> for content in d.text_content().split("\n"):
...     if content:
...             print content
...
Visit the Useful Tips Section
and I would like to get result : Visit the Useful Tips Section
Menu
HTML
CSS
and I would like to get Menu HTML CSS
>>>

Upvotes: 1

RumburaK
RumburaK

Reputation: 2185

I understand you are trying to strip out the HTML tags and keep only the text.

You can define a regular expression that represents the tags. Then substitute all matches with the empty string.

Example:

def remove_html_tags(data):
    p = re.compile(r'<.*?>')
    return p.sub('', data)

References:

Example

Docs about python regular expressions

Upvotes: 0

user278064
user278064

Reputation: 10170

string = '<a href="#tips">Visit the Useful Tips Section</a>'
re.findall('<[^>]*>(.*)<[^>]*>', string) //return 'Visit the Useful Tips Section'

Upvotes: 1

unwind
unwind

Reputation: 399753

You should use a proper HTML parsing library, such as the HTMLParser module.

Upvotes: 3

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