CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonregex
jvitasek
jvitasek

Reputation: 810

Why isn't this regexp working

I have a source code of a webpage formatted like this:

<span class="l r positive-icon">
Turkish
</span>
<span>
The.Mist[2007]DvDrip[Eng]-aXXo
</span>
<span class="l r neutral-icon">
Vietnamese
</span>
<span>
The.Mist.2007.720p.Bluray.x264.YIFY 
</span>

As you can see, there are either spans with the class of "l r positive-icon" or "l r neutral-icon". I want to get only the languages, so everything between the span with any class. I use this regexp but it gives me an empty list:

allLanguages = re.findall('<span class=".*">\s(.*)\s</span>', allLanguagesTags)

allLanguagesTags contains the source code shown above. Can anybody give me a hint?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 48

Answers (1)

Martijn Pieters
Martijn Pieters

Reputation: 1121972

Don't use regular expressions. Use an actual HTML parser. I recommend you use BeautifulSoup instead:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(yourhtml)
languages = [s.get_text().strip() for s in soup.find_all('span', class_=True)]

Demo:

>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup('''\
... <span class="l r positive-icon">
... Turkish
... </span>
... <span>
... The.Mist[2007]DvDrip[Eng]-aXXo
... </span>
... <span class="l r neutral-icon">
... Vietnamese
... </span>
... <span>
... The.Mist.2007.720p.Bluray.x264.YIFY 
... </span>
... ''')
>>> [s.get_text().strip() for s in soup.find_all('span', class_=True)]
[u'Turkish', u'Vietnamese']

Upvotes: 3

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