CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonregex
user1472850
user1472850

Reputation: 329

python regex findall <span>

I wanna find all thing between <span class=""> and </span> 

p = re.compile('<span class=\"\">(.*?)\</span>', re.IGNORECASE)
text = re.findall(p, z)

for example in this case <span class="">foo</span> expected return foo but it returns any thing !!! why my code goes wrong ?

Cheers

Upvotes: 0

Views: 5000

Answers (2)

Mark Tolonen
Mark Tolonen

Reputation: 177800

Your original code works as is. You should use an HTML parser though.

import re
p = re.compile('<span class=\"\">(.*?)\</span>', re.IGNORECASE)
z = '<span class="">foo</span>'
text = re.findall(p, z)
print text

Output:

['foo']

Edit

As Tim points out, re.DOTALL should be used or the below would fail:

import re
p = re.compile('<span class="">(.*?)\</span>', re.IGNORECASE|re.DOTALL)
z = '''<span class=""> a more
complicated foo</span>'''
text = re.findall(p, z)
print text

Even then it would fail for nested spans:

import re
p = re.compile('<span class="">(.*?)\</span>', re.IGNORECASE|re.DOTALL)
z = '''<span class=""> a more
complicated<span class="other">other</span>foo</span>'''
text = re.findall(p, z)
print text

Output (failing):

[' a more\ncomplicated<span class="other">other']

So use an HTML parser like BeautifulSoup:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
soup = bs(z)
p = re.compile('<span class="">(.*?)\</span>', re.IGNORECASE|re.DOTALL)
z = '''<span class=""> a more
complicated<span class="other">other</span>foo</span>'''
soup = BeautifulSoup(z)
print soup.findAll('span',{'class':''})
print
print soup.findAll('span',{'class':'other'})

Output:

[<span class=""> a more
complicated<span class="other">other</span>foo</span>]

[<span class="other">other</span>]

Upvotes: 2

Martijn Pieters
Martijn Pieters

Reputation: 1122572

Since HTML is not a regular language, you really should use an XML parser instead.

Python has several to choose from:

Upvotes: 4

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