Python regex and spaces?

Question

If I have a piece of text, i.e.

title="gun control" href="/EBchecked/topic/683775/gun-control"

and want to create a regular expression that matches (see inside <> below)

title="<1 word or many words separated by a space>" href="/EBchecked/topic/\w*/\S*"

How do I solve that part in the <>?

It looks like you are trying to parse HTML; why not use a proper HTML parser instead? BeautifulSoup makes HTML handling a breeze: for link in soup.find_all('a', href=True): print link.attrs.get('title', 'No title set'), link['href']. — Martijn Pieters
– Martijn Pieters, Commented May 9, 2013 at 18:14
that is a way better idea than me trying to write bad regexes... good suggestion - I will look into it. Thanks! — brett
– brett, Commented May 9, 2013 at 19:00
Martijn - could you help me get started using beautiful soup? if I wanted to get all the hyperlinks from <div class="md-content-wrapper resizable-content topic-content "> of the url britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/596738/Tipperary - How would I do that exactly? Thanks again for your previous input and 2x thanks in advance if you get around to answering this question! — brett
– brett, Commented May 13, 2013 at 21:53
You could make that a proper question; I'd use content = soup.find('div', 'topic-content'), then for link in content.find_all('a', href=True): print link.attrs.get('title', 'No title set'), link['href']. — Martijn Pieters
– Martijn Pieters, Commented May 13, 2013 at 21:55

Andrew Clark · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-09 18:15:21Z

2

The following regex will match 1 word or many words separated by a space:

\w+( \w+)*

Here a "word" is considered to consist of letters, digits, and underscores. If you only want to allow letters you could use [a-zA-Z]+( [a-zA-Z]+)*.

answered May 9, 2013 at 18:15

Andrew Clark

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2 Comments

brett Over a year ago

Thanks! Works great. Appreciate the help.

Andrew Clark Over a year ago

@brett No problem, if my answer works you can accept it by clicking the outline of the check mark next to the answer. This lets others on the site know that you found a solution.

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