Regex pattern to extract tag and its contents

Question

considering this:

input = """Yesterday<person>Peter</person>drove to<location>New York</location>"""

how can one use regex patterns to extract:

person: Peter
location: New York

This works well, but I dont want to hard code the tags, they can change:

print re.findall("<person>(.*?)</person>", input)
print re.findall("<location>(.*?)</location>", input)

You are getting dangerously close to http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/3001761 — jonrsharpe, Mar 24 '14 at 19:58

PyNEwbie · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-24T21:20:24.050

6

Use a tool designed for the work. I happen to like lxml but their are other

>>> minput = """Yesterday<person>Peter Smith</person>drove to<location>New York</location>"""
>>> from lxml import html
>>> tree = html.fromstring(minput)
>>> for e in tree.iter():
        print e, e.tag, e.text_content()
        if e.tag() == 'person':          # getting the last name per comment
           last = e.text_content().split()[-1]
           print last


<Element p at 0x3118ca8> p YesterdayPeter Smithdrove toNew York
<Element person at 0x3118b48> person Peter Smith
Smith                                            # here is the last name
<Element location at 0x3118ba0> location New York

If you are new to Python then you might want to visit this site to get an installer for a number of packages including LXML.

edited Mar 24 '14 at 21:20

answered Mar 24 '14 at 19:59

PyNEwbie

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Thanks @PyNEwbie in case of ´Peter Smith´ how can I use ´text_content()´ to extract only ´Smith´ ? – DevEx Mar 24 '14 at 20:42
You can't but you can split the string once you have it. – PyNEwbie Mar 24 '14 at 21:16
@PyNEwbie, is there any similar method I can use to get words that are not inside the tags: `"Yesterday" & "drove to"` ? – DevEx Mar 26 '14 at 13:52
Precisely, I want to do something like: Yesterday _person_ Smith drove to _location_ New York. Thanks @PyNEwbie for helping with lxml to parse the trees – DevEx Mar 26 '14 at 14:29

alecxe · Answer 2 · 2014-03-24T20:07:43.433

3

Avoid parsing HTML with regex, use an HTML parser instead.

Here's an example using BeautifulSoup:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup    

data = "Yesterday<person>Peter</person>drove to<location>New York</location>"
soup = BeautifulSoup(data)

print 'person: %s' % soup.person.text
print 'location: %s' % soup.location.text

prints:

person: Peter
location: New York

Note the simplicity of the code.

Hope that helps.

edited Mar 24 '14 at 20:07

answered Mar 24 '14 at 20:01

alecxe

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Regex pattern to extract tag and its contents

2 Answers2