Regex Search after a variable length text

Question

I need regex for extracting the text from the following tag: I am using Python & BeautifulSoup

    <h4 style="color:#000000; line-height:20px; font-size:18px; margin-left:22px;
 overflow:auto; content:inherit; padding:10px; font-family:"Book Antiqua", 
Palatino, serif;">THE TEXT TO BE EXTRACTED IS HERE</h4></div><br /></div>

I tried the following:

stylecontent = 'color:#000000; line-height:20px; font-size:18px; margin-left:22px;
     overflow:auto; content:inherit; padding:10px; font-family:"Book Antiqua", 
    Palatino, serif;'

soup = BeautifulSoup(br.response().read(), "lxml")

scrap_soup = soup.findAll('h4', {'style': stylecontent})

but It doesn't works always as the website keeps changing stylecontent. Now I want to use regex:

soup.find_all(re.compile("some_foo_regex")):

I am interested in that some_foo_regex.

Thanks.

What tool/language are you using ? BTW this HTML is incorrect (look at the quotes) — Denys Séguret, Aug 24 '15 at 11:38
Which language you were using. [Instead of regex you can simply use DOM](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags) — Narendrasingh Sisodia, Aug 24 '15 at 11:40
See what HTML parsers exist for the language you are using. HTML and regular expressions do not go well together. — npinti, Aug 24 '15 at 11:40
Use a parser, not a regex. What if you have an attribute like `someAttr=">fail"` ? — Denys Séguret, Aug 24 '15 at 11:41
This one may be useful: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19242661/extracting-a-part-of-string-using-grep-sed — Krzysztof Kazmierczyk, Aug 24 '15 at 11:44
I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's a regex question and OP didn't precise any tool, language, or regex flavour. — Denys Séguret, Aug 24 '15 at 11:54
@DenysSéguret Yeah, the HTML may be wrong, but it's not my code, It's in the website that I am trying to scrap. — Aniket Vij, Aug 24 '15 at 13:28
What is the constant expression? How can you identify the `h4` tag? Only when you know a pattern can you use a regex. Maybe the parent tag is known? What about getting all `div`s with `h4` and then checking some other condition? — Wiktor Stribiżew, Aug 24 '15 at 13:39
@stribizhev Constant thing is: `
GET THIS TEXT
` I want all the text in h4 tag which has style element. — Aniket Vij, Aug 24 '15 at 14:17
What about `h4_list = soup.find_all(lambda tag:tag.name == "h4" and len(tag.attrs) == 1 and tag["style"])`? — Wiktor Stribiżew, Aug 24 '15 at 14:21
Or, `h4_tags = soup.find_alll('h4', attrs = {'style' : True}) \n for result in h4_tags: \n if len(result.attrs) == 1: \n print result` — Wiktor Stribiżew, Aug 24 '15 at 14:32
@stribizhev Thanks! that gets me all the h4 tags with style element. Is there a way to get the text from these tags? Also can you add as answer so that I can Upvote? — Aniket Vij, Aug 24 '15 at 14:50

Wiktor Stribiżew · Accepted Answer · 2015-08-24T15:12:54.980

1

You may get all the h4 tags that have only one attribute style with

h4_tags = soup.find_all('h4', attrs = {'style' : True}) # Get all H4 tags with style attribute
for result in h4_tags:
    if len(result.attrs) == 1:                          # Print if it is the only attribute
        print result.contents                           # Print tag text contents

edited Aug 24 '15 at 15:12

answered Aug 24 '15 at 15:02

Wiktor Stribiżew

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Is there a way to get the text from these tags? Also My upvote doesn't works as I need to have atleast 15 reputation. BTW, I also get tags which have other tags including style. – Aniket Vij Aug 24 '15 at 15:06
Doesn't `result.contents` print the contents? You have 15 rep now, BTW :) Also, what about the lambda solution: `h4_list = soup.find_all(lambda tag:tag.name == "h4" and len(tag.attrs) == 1 and tag["style"]) \n for result in h4_list: \n print result.contents`? – Wiktor Stribiżew Aug 24 '15 at 15:07
`h4_tags = soup.find_all('h4', attrs = {'style' : True})` gives me all tags I need and few extra, but running that loop gives me only one result. – Aniket Vij Aug 24 '15 at 15:09
That gives me a `KeyError: 'style'` – Aniket Vij Aug 24 '15 at 15:17
Thanks for letting know. – Wiktor Stribiżew Aug 24 '15 at 15:31

Regex Search after a variable length text

GET THIS TEXT

1 Answers1