Regex to extract text between and tag

Question

I need to extract the text between the and tag using regex in python.

Example: Customizable:Features Windows 10 Pro and legacy ports including VGA, HDMI, RJ-45, USB Type A connections.

For this i am doing:

pattern=re.compile("(<b>(.*?)</b>)|(<strong>(.*?)</strong>)")
for label in labels:
    print(label)
    flag=0
    if(('Window'in label or 'Windows' in label) and ('<b>' in label or '<strong>' in label)):
        text=re.findall(pattern, label)
        print(text)

where labels is the list of such html elements containing tag. The output expected is ['Features Windows 10','including VGA,']

Instead in a getting the outuput as: [('', 'Features Windows 10 Pro'), ('including VGA,', '')]

Please help. Thanks in advance.

You don't use regex to parse HTML. See [this answer](https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/2789863). — tblznbits, Oct 11 '18 at 13:37
I'm confused. Why wouldn't your expected output include `pro`? — DeepSpace, Oct 11 '18 at 13:39

score 6 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 11 '18 at 13:40

Care for BeautifulSoup ?

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

data = BeautifulSoup("""Customizable:<strong>Features Windows 10 Pro</strong> and legacy ports <b>including VGA,</b> HDMI, RJ-45, USB Type A connections""")

data.find_all('strong')[0].text
data.find_all('b')[0].text

Output

Features Windows 10 Pro
'including VGA,'

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

First you should not use regexes to parse markup text.

That being said, the result is by design. The documentation for re.findall is explicit about it (emphasize mine):

re.findall(pattern, string, flags=0)

Return all non-overlapping matches of pattern in string, as a list of strings. The string is scanned left-to-right, and matches are returned in the order found. If one or more groups are present in the pattern, return a list of groups; this will be a list of tuples if the pattern has more than one group.

Your pattern contains 2 groups, one for , one for . You get two tuples so that you can know what group was matched.

If you do not like that, you could use finditer instead which will return a match object. And group(0) on the match object is the part of the string that was matched:

text = [m.group() for m in pattern.finditer(label)]

Regex to extract text between and tag

2 Answers2