CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonregex
PaulDaviesC
PaulDaviesC

Reputation: 1261

Processing a HTML file using Python

I wanted to remove all the tags in HTML file. For that I used re module of python. For example, consider the line <h1>Hello World!</h1>.I want to retain only "Hello World!". In order to remove the tags, I used re.sub('<.*>','',string). For obvious reasons the result I get is an empty string (The regexp identifies the first and last angle brackets and removes everything in between). How could I get over this issue?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 312

Answers (5)

varunl
varunl

Reputation: 20239

Beautiful Soup is great for parsing html!

You might not require it now, but it's worth learning to use it. Will help you in the future too.

Upvotes: 0

Marco Mariani
Marco Mariani

Reputation: 13766

Use a parser, either lxml or BeautifulSoup:

import lxml.html
print lxml.html.fromstring(mystring).text_content()

Related questions:

Using regular expressions to parse HTML: why not?

Why it's not possible to use regex to parse HTML/XML: a formal explanation in layman's terms

Upvotes: 1

Ned Batchelder
Ned Batchelder

Reputation: 375624

You can make the match non-greedy: '<.*?>'

You also need to be careful, HTML is a crafty beast, and can thwart your regexes.

Upvotes: 1

akonsu
akonsu

Reputation: 29536

make it non-greedy: http://docs.python.org/release/2.6/howto/regex.html#greedy-versus-non-greedy

off-topic: the approach that uses regular expressions is error prone. it cannot handle cases when angle brackets do not represent tags. I recommend http://lxml.de/

Upvotes: 1

Sunjay Varma
Sunjay Varma

Reputation: 5115

Parse the HTML using BeautifulSoup, then only retrieve the text.

Upvotes: 1

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