Python regex sub

Question

I want to delete all comment. This is my regular expression :

re.sub(re.compile('<!--.*-->', re.DOTALL),'', text)

But if my text is :

bzzzzzz <!-- blabla --> blibli <!-- bloblo --> blublu

the result is :

bzzzzzz blublu

instead of :

bzzzzzz blibli blublu

Thanks for your help

naeg · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-21 08:07:02Z

11

I'd suggest not to use regex for this kind of stuff. There is always a better solution, such as lxml.html.clean.

Your example:

import lxml.html.clean as clean
cleaner = clean.Cleaner(comments=True)
cleaner.clean_html("bzzzzzz <!-- blabla --> blibli <!-- bloblo --> blublu")
#'bzzzzzz  blibli  blublu'

answered Sep 21, 2011 at 8:07

naeg

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Comments

Tim Pietzcker · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-21 08:09:44Z

8

* is greedy while *? is not

re.sub(re.compile('<!--.*?-->', re.DOTALL), '', text)

or, even shorter:

re.sub('(?s)<!--.*?-->', '', text)

edited Sep 21, 2011 at 8:09

Tim Pietzcker

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answered Sep 21, 2011 at 8:02

neurino

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