3

I have below piece of html and need to extract only text from there between 

<p>Current</p> and <p>Archive</p>

Html chunk looks like:

<p>Current</p>
<a href="some link to somewhere 1">File1</a>
<br>
<a href="some link to somewhere 2">File2</a>
<br>
<a href="some link to somewhere 3">File3</a>
<br>
<p>Archive</p>
<a href="Some another link to another file">Some another file</a>

so the desired output should looks like File1, File2, File3.

This is what I've tried so far

import re
m = re.compile('<p>Current</p>(.*?)<p>Archive</p>').search(text)

but doesn't work as expected.

Is there any simple solution how to extract text between specified chunks of html tags in python?

mateskabe
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2 Answers2

1

If you insist upon using regex you can use it in combination with list comp like so:

chunk="""<p>Current</p>
<a href="some link to somewhere 1">File1</a>
<br>
<a href="some link to somewhere 2">File2</a>
<br>
<a href="some link to somewhere 3">File3</a>
<br>
<p>Archive</p>
<a href="Some another link to another file">Some another file</a>"""

import re 

# find all things between > and < the shorter the better  
found = re.findall(r">(.+?)<",chunk) 

# only use the stuff after "Current" before "Archive"
found[:] = found[ found.index("Current")+1:found.index("Archive")]

print(found) # python 3 syntax, remove () for python2.7

Output:

['File1', 'File2', 'File3']
Patrick Artner
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0
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as bs


html_text = """
<p>Current</p>
<a href="some link to somewhere 1">File1</a>
<br>
<a href="some link to somewhere 2">File2</a>
<br>
<a href="some link to somewhere 3">File3</a>
<br>
<p>Archive</p>
<a href="Some another link to another file">Some another file</a>"""

a_tag = soup.find_all("a")

text = []
for i in a_tag:
   text.append(get_text())

print (text)

Output:

['File1', 'File2', 'File3', 'Some another file']

BeautifulSoup library will be very useful for parsing html files and getting text from them.

mcgusty
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