Why is this Python regular expression code finding only empty results?

Question

The code I have is:

    matches = re.search('(<meta.*?>)', contents, re.DOTALL)
    if matches:
        for group in matches.groups():
            metas.append(group)
    title = re.search('(<title>.*?</title>)', contents, re.DOTALL)
    if title.groups():
        found_title = title.group(1) + '\n'
    else:
        found_title = ''

It's working on an HTML page that has meta and title tags (lowercase), so I would expect multiple matches for the meta tags and a nonempty title. Adding or removing parentheses around the regular expression does not seem to make a difference.

MRAB · Accepted Answer · 2012-11-24 00:50:37Z

2

re.search searches for the first match. You need to use re.findall or re.finditer.

answered Nov 24, 2012 at 0:50

MRAB

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