how to find more than one match with a regular expression?

Question

i have a string like this:

to_search = "example <a>first</a> asdqwe <a>second</a>"

and i want to find both solutions between like this:

list = ["first","second"]

i know that when searching for one solution i should use this code:

import re

if to_search.find("<a>") > -1:
    result = re.search('<a>(.*?)</a>', to_search)
    s = result.group(1)
    print(s)

but that only prints:

first

i tried result.group(2) and result.group(0) but i get the same solution

how can i make a list of all solutions?

"Asking for HTML, JSON, etc. regexes tends to be met with negative reactions. If there is a parser for it, use that instead." — Sayse, Oct 10 '19 at 15:12
Whether or not you were using HTML didn't seem relevant to me, you were still trying to extract html from a string, to which the correct answer is use a html parser — Sayse, Oct 10 '19 at 15:33
no, my question is **not** about _extracting html_ , my question is about regex inside a string. and the correct answer is **not** _use an html praser_ , the answer is use `re.findall` as answered [by @Simon](https://stackoverflow.com/a/58326242/12160728) . using an html parser on another string with "(a)" instead of "" would not work. thank you — problem404, Oct 10 '19 at 15:50
also the same string that i used is written in the python documentations under [Regular expression operations](https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html) i did not use just because i like html or anything. "" is literally written in the python documentation for the Regular expressions — problem404, Oct 10 '19 at 16:13

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited Oct 10 '19 at 15:21

1

best to use a HTML parser than regex, but change re.search to re.findall

edited Oct 10 '19 at 15:21

3limin4t0r

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answered Oct 10 '19 at 15:16

flexi

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score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 10 '19 at 15:19

1

Just use:

import re
to_search = "example <a>first</a> asdqwe <a>second</a>"
matches = re.findall(r'<a>(.*?)</a>', to_search)
print(matches)

OUTPUT

['first', 'second']

answered Oct 10 '19 at 15:19

AnsFourtyTwo

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 10 '19 at 15:18

0

to_search = "example <a>first</a> asdqwe <a>second</a>"
for match in re.finditer("<a>(.*?)</a>", to_search):
    captured_group = match.group(1)
    # do something with captured group

answered Oct 10 '19 at 15:18

Gabriel

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how to find more than one match with a regular expression?

3 Answers3