CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonregexbeautifulsoup
Leon
Leon

Reputation: 6554

A regular expression in BeautifulSoup 4

I need to find element with 'random' id in html. My code is look like:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import re
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
print soup.find(id="id_123456_name")

123456 - may changes every time, so I find this, but I cant understand, how use it.

I try:

soup.find(id="id_%s_name" % (re.compile("\d+")) )

But nothing find. Whats the problem?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 90

Answers (1)

Martijn Pieters
Martijn Pieters

Reputation: 1124278

You need to make the whole value a regular expression object:

soup.find(id=re.compile("id_\d+_name"))

In your version, you are still looking for a literal string, not a regular expression, because you converted the regular expression object into a string instead. The literal string has a very strange value:

>>> import re
>>> "id_%s_name" % (re.compile("\d+"))
'id_<_sre.SRE_Pattern object at 0x10f111750>_name'

This value of course is never found in your HTML document.

Upvotes: 1

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