I'm trying to use regex to parse an XML file (in my case this seems the simplest way).
For example a line might be:
line='<City_State>PLAINSBORO, NJ 08536-1906</City_State>'
To access the text for the tag City_State, I'm using:
attr = re.match('>.*<', line)
but nothing is being returned.
Can someone point out what I'm doing wrong?
You normally don't want to use re.match. Quoting from the docs:
If you want to locate a match anywhere in string, use search() instead (see also search() vs. match()).
Note:
>>> print re.match('>.*<', line)
None
>>> print re.search('>.*<', line)
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x10f666238>
>>> print re.search('>.*<', line).group(0)
>PLAINSBORO, NJ 08536-1906<
Also, why parse XML with regex when you can use something like BeautifulSoup :).
>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as BS
>>> line='<City_State>PLAINSBORO, NJ 08536-1906</City_State>'
>>> soup = BS(line)
>>> print soup.find('city_state').text
PLAINSBORO, NJ 08536-1906
Please, just use an XML parser like ElementTree
>>> from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET
>>> line='<City_State>PLAINSBORO, NJ 08536-1906</City_State>'
>>> ET.fromstring(line).text
'PLAINSBORO, NJ 08536-1906'
re.match returns a match only if the pattern matches the entire string. To find substrings matching the pattern, use re.search.
And yes, this is a simple way to parse XML, but I would highly encourage you to use a library specifically designed for the task.
re.match is left side anchored but does not have to consume the entire string. Very loosely, given regexp X, re.match is like re.search using ^X (but not ^X$). There are other differences, particularly with strings containing newlines; see documentation link in Haidro's answer.