CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonregex
Teifion
Teifion

Reputation: 110969

Finding anchor text when there are tags there

I want to find the text between a pair of <a> tags that link to a given site

Here's the re string that I'm using to find the content:

r'''(<a([^<>]*)href=("|')(http://)?(www\.)?%s([^'"]*)("|')([^<>]*)>([^<]*))</a>''' % our_url

The result will be something like this:

r'''(<a([^<>]*)href=("|')(http://)?(www\.)?stackoverflow.com([^'"]*)("|')([^<>]*)>([^<]*))</a>'''

This is great for most links but it errors with a link with tags within it. I tried changing the final part of the regex from:

([^<]*))</a>'''

to:

(.*))</a>'''

But that just got everything on the page after the link, which I don't want. Are there any suggestions on what I can do to solve this?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 846

Answers (4)

MarkusQ
MarkusQ

Reputation: 21950

Instead of:

[^<>]*

Try:

((?!</a).)*

In other words, match any character that isn't the start of a </a sequence.

Upvotes: 3

riza
riza

Reputation: 17124

>>> import re
>>> pattern = re.compile(r'<a.+href=[\'|\"](.+)[\'|\"].*?>(.+)</a>', re.IGNORECASE)
>>> link = '<a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/603199/finding-anchor-text-when-there-are-tags-there">Finding anchor text when there are tags there</a>'
>>> re.match(pattern, link).group(1)
'http://stackoverflow.com/questions/603199/finding-anchor-text-when-there-are-tags-there'
>>> re.match(pattern, link).group(2)
'Finding anchor text when there are tags there'

Upvotes: 3

Andrew Cox
Andrew Cox

Reputation: 10988

Do a non greedy search i.e. 

(.*?)

Upvotes: 1

Andrew Hare
Andrew Hare

Reputation: 351516

I would not use a regex - use an HTML parser like Beautiful Soup.

Upvotes: 2

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