CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonregex
Dilip T Monson
Dilip T Monson

Reputation: 85

How to convert _sre.SRE_Match type to string and integer

I am trying to parse regular expression in Python and am assigning the value of the parsed string to 2 variables.

For instance if I have a string

<tr align="right"><td>1</td><td>Michael</td><td>Jessica</td>

I want to assign value 1 to an integer variable called rank and values[Michael, Jessica] to an array called name.

When I parse using re.search() and assign value using .group() function the type of the variables assigned is _sre.SRE_Match . Can you please help me on how to convert it to integer and string formats respectively.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 7988

Answers (2)

falsetru
falsetru

Reputation: 369394

The following line:

rank = re.search('(\d)+', line)

should be replaced with:

rank = re.search(r'\d+', line).group()   # (..) is not needed

to get a string.

If you want int object, use int:

rank = int(re.search(r'\d+', line).group())

BTW, using re.findall, your program can be simplified.

import re

def extract_rankname(line):
    groups = re.findall('<td>(.*?)</td>', line)
    try:
        rank = groups[0]   # int(groups[0])
        return {rank: groups[1:]}
    except ValueError:
        return {}  # return None

extract_rankname('<tr align="right"><td>1</td><td>Michael</td><td>Jessica</td>')
# => {'1': ['Michael', 'Jessica']}

Alternatively, instead of using regular expression, when parsing HTML, it's better to use library like BeatufiulSoup, lxml.

>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup('<tr align="right"><td>1</td><td>Michael</td><td>Jessica</td>', 'lxml')
>>> [td.text for td in soup.find_all('td')]
[u'1', u'Michael', u'Jessica']
>>> tds = [td.text for td in soup.find_all('td')]
>>> tds[0], tds[1:]
(u'1', [u'Michael', u'Jessica'])
>>> print(tds[0])  # rank
1
>>> tds[1:]  # names
[u'Michael', u'Jessica']

Upvotes: 5

Mustofa Rizwan
Mustofa Rizwan

Reputation: 10476

You can try this :

<td>(\w+)<\/td>

Demo

Then iterate through the matches and assigned to array or variable ...

Sample Code (Run it here):

import re    
regex = r"<td>(\w+)<\/td>"    
test_str = "<tr align=\"right\"><td>1</td><td>Michael</td><td>Jessica</td>"
values=[]   
matches = re.finditer(regex, test_str)    
for match in matches:
  if match.group(1).isdigit():
    rank = int(match.group(1))
  else:
    values.append(match.group(1))

print(rank)
print(values)

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions