Regular expression extracting data

Question

If I have to extract values of certain attributes from the HTML page source. For ex:

If I want to get the value of address?

    <span class="address">413 W. Street</span></span><br>

EDIT: Sorry I understood the question wrong. I tried deleting this question but wasnt able to. I have posted new question here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9144544/regular-expressions-for-different-attributes

What base language are you parsing the HTML with? I'm taking it for granted you'd don't have the access to reformat the HTML before your code gets ahold of it. — Kummer Wolfe, Feb 04 '12 at 20:07

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 04 '12 at 20:13

It's kind of difficult to use regex to scrape data from raw html since the pattern may change for different sites. It's easier to use something that can look through the DOM tree.

If you're using python, you can use BeautifulSoup. Here's the doc. It does exactly what you want. Link

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

0

It's a python code.

>>> import re
>>> s = '<span class="address">413 W. Street</span><br><span class="phone">218-999-1020</span>, <span class="region">WA</span> <span class="postal-code">87112</span><br>'
>>> re.findall(r'address">(.*?)<.*phone">(.*?)<.*region">(.*?)<.*postal-code">(.*?)<', s)
[('413 W. Street', '218-999-1020', 'WA', '87112')]
>>>

BTW, don't forget to see this

edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

Community

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answered Feb 04 '12 at 20:19

shadyabhi

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Sorry I understood the question wrong. I tried deleting this question but wasnt able to. I have posted new question here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9144544/regular-expressions-for-different-attributes – user807496 Feb 04 '12 at 21:13

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:18

You should not use regular expression to parse html. It's well explained here:

RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags

Still, if you know exact structure of the html text you want to parse, you can try use this regex (prepared for C# program, so may vary depending on your code language):

\<span[^">]*class="([^"]+)[^>]*>([^<]*)

Then you can access name of the class (e.g. address, phone, etc) in first matched group, and the value in the 2nd.

Regular expression extracting data

3 Answers3

BTW, don't forget to see this