CODEWITHSUNDEEP
python
Johnny
Johnny

Reputation: 175

How to extract particular strings in python

I'm trying to do extract particular strings in markup and save them (for more complex processing on this line). So say for example, I've read in a line from a file and the current line is:

<center><img border="0" src="http://www.world-of-waterfalls.com/images/Cascades_04_015L.jpg"  WIDTH="500" HEIGHT="375" alt="Looking up the Merced River Canyon towards Bridalveil Fall from the Big Oak Flat Road" ***PINIT***></center><br clear="all"><br clear="all">

But I want to store:

tempUrl = 'http://www.world-of-waterfalls.com/images/Cascades_04_015L.jpg'

tempWidth = 500

tempHeight = 375

tempAlt = 'Looking up the Merced River Canyon towards Bridalveil Fall from the Big Oak Flat Road'

How would I go about doing that in Python?

Thanks

Upvotes: 0

Views: 56

Answers (2)

A. Steiner
A. Steiner

Reputation: 31

And the regex approach:

import re

string = "YOUR STRING"
matches = re.findall("src=\"(.*?)\".*WIDTH=\"(.*?)\".*HEIGHT=\"(.*?)\".*alt=\"(.*?)\"", string)[0]
tempUrl = matches[0]
tempWidth = matches[1]
tempHeight = matches[2]
tempAlt = matches[3]

All values are string though, so cast it if you want..

And know that with regex copy/paste is a bad idea. There could be mistakes easily.

Upvotes: 0

brianpck
brianpck

Reputation: 8254

Though you can get away with several approaches here, I recommend using an HTML parser, which is extensible and can deal with many issues in the HTML. Here's a working example with BeautifulSoup:

>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> string = """<center><img border="0" src="http://www.world-of-waterfalls.com/images/Cascades_04_015L.jpg"  WIDTH="500" HEIGHT="375" alt="Looking up the Merced River Canyon towards Bridalveil Fall from the Big Oak Flat Road" ***PINIT***></center><br clear="all"><br clear="all">"""
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(string, 'html.parser')
>>> for attr in ['width', 'height', 'alt']:
...     print('temp{} = {}'.format(attr.title(), soup.img[attr]))
...
tempWidth = 500
tempHeight = 375
tempAlt = Looking up the Merced River Canyon towards Bridalveil Fall from the Big Oak Flat Road

Upvotes: 3

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