CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonhtmlregex
Helen Neely
Helen Neely

Reputation: 4740

Python Regex - Parsing HTML

I have this little code and it's giving me AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'group'.

import sys
import re

#def extract_names(filename):

f = open('name.html', 'r')
text = f.read()

match = re.search (r'<hgroup><h1>(\w+)</h1>', text)
second = re.search (r'<li class="hover">Employees: <b>(\d+,\d+)</b></li>', text)  

outf = open('details.txt', 'a')
outf.write(match)
outf.close()

My intention is to read a .HTML file looking for the <h1> tag value and the number of employees and append them to a file. But for some reason I can't seem to get it right. Your help is greatly appreciated.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 3091

Answers (2)

Pierre GM
Pierre GM

Reputation: 20329

Just for the sake of completion: your error message just indicate that your regular expression failed and did not return anything...

Upvotes: 1

Martijn Pieters
Martijn Pieters

Reputation: 1121186

You are using a regular expression, but matching XML with such expressions gets too complicated, too fast. Don't do that.

Use a HTML parser instead, Python has several to choose from:

The latter two handle malformed HTML quite gracefully as well, making decent sense of many a botched website.

ElementTree example:

from xml.etree import ElementTree

tree = ElementTree.parse('filename.html')
for elem in tree.findall('h1'):
    print ElementTree.tostring(elem)

Upvotes: 6

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