Regular expression to return list in Python?

Question

So, I'm wanting to make a list in Python from a large chunk of HTML code, but I'm trying to split it up based on the HTML tags. I'm not well versed in regular expressions so I don't know how to go about this. For instance, let's say I had this piece of HTML code:

<option value="674"> Example text here </option><option value="673"> Example text here</option><option value="672"> Example text here </option>

I would like for me to be able to save this code (albeit a much bigger version of it) into a string, and then use a function to return a list like this:

list = ["Example text here", "Example text here", "Example text here"]

Anyway I can do this?

Stop now and use an HTML parser. Please.

roippi
– roippi

2014-05-02 02:23:42 +00:00
Commented May 2, 2014 at 2:23 — roippi
– roippi, Commented May 2, 2014 at 2:23
Thank you, I was unaware of this library.

Bloo
– Bloo

2014-05-02 02:29:55 +00:00
Commented May 2, 2014 at 2:29 — Bloo
– Bloo, Commented May 2, 2014 at 2:29

hwnd · Accepted Answer · 2014-05-02 04:05:44Z

1

You could simply use BeautifulSoup for this purpose.

import bs4

html = '''
<option value="674"> Example text here </option>
<option value="673"> Example text here</option>
<option value="672"> Example text here </option>
'''

soup  = bs4.BeautifulSoup(html)
mylst = [str(x.text).strip() for x in soup.find_all('option')]

Output

['Example text here', 'Example text here', 'Example text here']

edited May 2, 2014 at 4:05

answered May 2, 2014 at 3:23

hwnd

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Comments

sshashank124 · Accepted Answer · 2014-05-02 02:25:08Z

1

I agree with @roippi's comment, please use HTML parser. However, if you really want to use regex, the following is what you want:

import re

s = '<option value="674"> Example text here </option><option value="673"> Example text here</option><option value="672"> Example text here </option>'

>>> print re.findall(r'>\s*([^<]+?)\s*<', s)
['Example text here', 'Example text here', 'Example text here']

answered May 2, 2014 at 2:25

sshashank124

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