How to extract data from two similar html class elements using a regular expression?

Question

How to extract the up vote (215) and Down vote (82) count from the following html snippet using python regular expression?

<span class="vote-actions">
    <a class="btn btn-default vote-action-good">
        <span class="icon thumb-up black black-hover">&nbsp;</span>
        <span class="rating-inbtn">215</span>
    </a>
    <a class="btn btn-default vote-action-bad">
        <span class="icon thumb-down grey black-hover">&nbsp;</span>
        <span class="rating-inbtn">82</span>
    </a>
</span>

I have formatted the html Code but there is no '\n' or '\t' character present in the original code.

FYI i am not expecting any beautiful soup solution. Python Re search function is what I am looking for.

furas · Accepted Answer · 2019-04-07T00:38:06.770

To find both number I would do

text = '''<span class="vote-actions">
    <a class="btn btn-default vote-action-good">
        <span class="icon thumb-up black black-hover">&nbsp;</span>
        <span class="rating-inbtn">215</span>
    </a>
    <a class="btn btn-default vote-action-bad">
        <span class="icon thumb-down grey black-hover">&nbsp;</span>
        <span class="rating-inbtn">82</span>
    </a>
</span>'''

import re

a = re.findall('rating-inbtn">(\d+)', text)
print(a)

['215', '82']

In HTML I see that first number is Up and second is Down so I don't need better method.

up = a[0]
down = a[1]

If it is not enough then I would use HTML parser

text = '''<span class="vote-actions">
    <a class="btn btn-default vote-action-good">
        <span class="icon thumb-up black black-hover">&nbsp;</span>
        <span class="rating-inbtn">215</span>
    </a>
    <a class="btn btn-default vote-action-bad">
        <span class="icon thumb-down grey black-hover">&nbsp;</span>
        <span class="rating-inbtn">82</span>
    </a>
</span>'''

import lxml.html

soup = lxml.html.fromstring(text)

up = soup.xpath('//a[@class="btn btn-default vote-action-good"]/span[@class="rating-inbtn"]')
up = up[0].text
print(up)

down = soup.xpath('//a[@class="btn btn-default vote-action-bad"]/span[@class="rating-inbtn"]')
down = down[0].text
print(down)

Thanks. I was actually trying to modify an extractor of youtube-dl package and they have two helper functions one is _html_search_regex and another one is _search_regex. Those are performing a regex search on the given string, using a single or a list of patterns returning the first matching group. I believe I can integrate the findall function too. I liked the trick. — coolsaint, Apr 07 '19 at 00:49

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 07 '19 at 00:47

don't use regex to parse html https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/412529

here's how to do it with BeautifulSoup:

html = '''<span class="vote-actions">...'''
import bs4
soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(html)
soup.select("a.vote-action-good span.rating-inbtn")[0].text  # '215'
soup.select("a.vote-action-bad span.rating-inbtn")[0].text  # '82'

How to extract data from two similar html class elements using a regular expression?

2 Answers2