Simple function not return string value

Question

Hey!

First time posting a question here, I usually find the answer by searching but this time I came up dry.

I'm writing a really simple function in Python but it's refusing to return a value. Basically you're supposed to input HTML-code and it will remove all the HTML tags (by searching for < and >, then stitching together a new string).

def pretty_print(source_code):
    article_nohtml = remove_html(source_code)

    print(article_nohtml)

def remove_html(article):
    code_starts_at = article.find('<')

    if code_starts_at != -1:
        beginning_of_article = article[:code_starts_at]
        code_ends_at = article.find('>')+1
        end_of_article = article[code_ends_at:]
        stitched_article = beginning_of_article + end_of_article
        remove_html(stitched_article)
    else:
        print(type(article))
        print(article)
        return article

#Test the function
remove_html('<p>This is a text to <strong> try the script out </strong></p>\n<p>Is this working for you?</p>')

This piece of code does not contain anything extraordinary so it is a mystery to me why it isn't working. I've added the last two print calls just to test the function and they return class 'str' and the full string which is looking fine but when the pretty_print function is supposed to print the article it only outputs None.

Thankful for any help I can get, this should be straight forward but I'm probably missing something.

you do not return anything in the first part of the `if` condition. and why not use a library (e.g. beautifulsoup) for html parsing? — hiro protagonist, Jan 02 '17 at 10:26
@snakecharmerb That is true, but the else-statement is executed when all the code has been removed. — Niklas Aldén, Jan 02 '17 at 10:30
@hiroprotagonist I'm still learning so I thought it was a good challenge to build it myself. — Niklas Aldén, Jan 02 '17 at 10:31
@NiklasAldén: sure, that is always a good thing. happy pythoning! — hiro protagonist, Jan 02 '17 at 10:32

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 02 '17 at 10:26

3

In your remove_html function, within if you are making a recursive call to remove_html(stitched_article) but you are not returning it's value (which Python takes as None). Change it to:

return remove_html(stitched_article)

answered Jan 02 '17 at 10:26

Moinuddin Quadri

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Simple function not return string value

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