1

I'm trying to find a string inside a HTML page with known patterns. for example, in the following HTML code:

<TABLE WIDTH="100%">
<TR><TD ALIGN="LEFT" width="50%">&nbsp;</TD>
<TD ALIGN=RIGHT VALIGN=BOTTOM WIDTH=50%><FONT SIZE=-1>( <STRONG>1</STRONG></FONT> <FONT SIZE=-2>of</FONT> <STRONG><FONT SIZE=-1>1</STRONG> )</FONT></TD></TR></TABLE>
<HR>
<TABLE WIDTH="100%">
<TR>    <TD ALIGN="LEFT" WIDTH="50%"><B>String 1</B></TD>
    <TD ALIGN="RIGHT" WIDTH="50%"><B><A Name=h1 HREF=#h0></A><A  HREF=#h2></A><B><I></I></B>String</B></TD>
</TR>
<TR><TD ALIGN="LEFT" WIDTH="50%"><b>String 2.</B>
</TD>
<TD ALIGN="RIGHT" WIDTH="50%"> <B>
String 3
</B></TD>
</TR>
</TABLE>
<HR>
<font size="+1">String 4</font><BR>
...

I want to find String 4 , and I know that it will always be between

<HR><font size="+1">
and </font><BR>

how can I search for the string using RE?

edit:

I've tried the following, but no success:

p = re.match('<HR><font size="+1">(.*?)</font><BR>',html)

thanks.

Rgo
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  • Have you considered using xpath instead of regex? – Matt Gibson Jul 02 '12 at 13:14
  • I've tried using BeautifulSoup. It didn't work because I'm running the parser on multiple pages and there are slight changes between them. – Rgo Jul 02 '12 at 13:19
  • @Rgo: XPath queries (with lxml) can take care of pages with slight differences. – Martijn Pieters Jul 02 '12 at 13:23
  • Your try with re.match did not work because re.match tries to match from the beginning. Also the `+` has special meaning so should be escaped. But you were on the right way. – Marco de Wit Jul 02 '12 at 14:24

3 Answers3

4
re.findall(r'<HR>\s*<font size="\+1">(.*?)</font><BR>', html, re.DOTALL)

findall is returning a list with everything that is captured between the brackets in the regular expression. I used re.DOTALL so the dot also captures end of lines.

I used \s* because I was not sure whether there would be any whitespace.

Marco de Wit
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2

This works, but may not be very robust: 

import re
r = re.compile('<HR>\s?<font size="\+1">(.+?)</font>\s?<BR>', re.IGNORECASE)
r.findall(html)

You will be better off using a proper HTML parser. BeautifulSoup is excellent and easy to use. Look it up.

Jordan Dimov
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0
re.findall(r'<HR>\n<font size="\+1">([^<]*)<\/font><BR>', html, re.MULTILINE)
solarc
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