I'm trying to regexp a line from a webpage. The line is as follows:
<tr><td width=60 bgcolor='#ffffcc'><b>random Value</b></td><td align=center width=80>
This is what I tried, but it doesn't seem to work, can anyone help me out? 'htmlbody' contains the html page and no, I did not forget to import 're'.
reg = re.compile("<tr><td width=60 bgcolor='#ffffcc'><b>([^<]*)</b></td><td align=center width=80>")
value = reg.search(htmlbody)
print 'Value is', value
There is no surefire way to do this with a regex. See Can you provide some examples of why it is hard to parse XML and HTML with a regex? for why. What you need is an HTML parser like HTMLParser:
#!/usr/bin/python
from HTMLParser import HTMLParser
class FindTDs(HTMLParser):
def __init__(self):
HTMLParser.__init__(self)
self.level = 0
def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
if tag == 'td':
self.level = self.level + 1
def handle_endtag(self, tag):
if tag == 'td':
self.level = self.level - 1
def handle_data(self, data):
if self.level > 0:
print data
find = FindTDs()
html = "<table>\n"
for i in range(3):
html += "\t<tr>"
for j in range(5):
html += "<td>%s.%s</td>" % (i, j)
html += "</tr>\n"
html += "</table>"
find.feed(html)
It sounds like you may want to use findall rather than search:
reg = re.compile("<tr><td width=60 bgcolor='#ffffcc'><b>([^<]*)</b></td><td align=center width=80>")
value = reg.findall(htmlbody)
print 'Found %i match(es)' % len(value)
I have to caution you, though, that regular expressions are notoriously poor at handling HTML. You're better off using a proper parser using the HTMLParser module built in to Python.
This
import re
htmlbody = "<tr><td width=60 bgcolor='#ffffcc'><b>random Value</b></td><td align=center width=80>"
reg = re.compile("<tr><td width=60 bgcolor='#ffffcc'><b>([^<]*)</b></td><td align=center width=80>")
value = reg.search(htmlbody).group(1)
print 'Value is', value
prints out
Value is random Value
Is this what you want?
