I am having trouble figuring out how to select part of an html link using regex
say the link is:
<a href="race?raceid=1234">Mushroom Cup</a>
I have figured out how to get the race id, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to use a regular expression to find just 'Mushroom cup'. The best I can do is get 1234>Mushroom Cup.
I'm new to regular expressions and it is just too much for me to comprehend.
something very much like
re.findall('<a href="race\?raceid=(\d+)">([^<]+)</a>',html_text)
Don't ever use regex for parsing HTML. Instead use HTML parsers like lxml or BeautifulSoup.
Here's an example using BeautifulSoup:
import urlparse
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup("""
<html>
<head>
<title>Python regex url grab - Stack Overflow</title>
</head>
<body>
<a href="race?raceid=1234">Mushroom Cup</a>
</body>
</html
""")
link = soup.find('a')
par = urlparse.parse_qs(urlparse.urlparse(link.attrs['href']).query)
print par['raceid'][0] # prints 1234
print link.text # prints Mushroom Cup
Note, that urlparse is used for getting link parameter's value. See more here: Retrieving parameters from a URL.
Also see:
Hope that helps.
