I have a form like this:
<form id="search" method="get" action="search.php">
<input type="text" name="query" value="Search"/>
<input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form>
And i want the values in this oder: method action names
["get", "search.php", ["query"]]
I don't know how to do it in regex. Because this is also multilined string. I am also very new to regex.
As a proper way for parsing a HTML or XML document you should use a html(or xml) parser like beautifulsoup or lxml or ... . but if you just want to use regex that not be recommended you can use re.findall as following :
>>> [i for j in re.findall(r'method="([^ >"]*)"|action="([^ >"]*)"|name="([^ >"]*)"',s) for i in j if i]
['get', 'search.php', 'query']
[^ >]* match a string that not contain space and >.
I do agree with Michal Charemza's comment to go ahead and read the following post.
I will give an example using Lxml. It's a very powerful tool to parse and analyze HTML.
import lxml
from lxml.html import fromstring
html = fromstring("""<form id="search" method="get" action="search.php">
<input type="text" name="query" value="Search"/>
<input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form> """)
form = html.forms[0] # selecting the first form in the HTML page
# Extracting the data out of the form
print form.action, form.method, form.inputs.keys()
Enjoy,
Abdul
You could use BeautifulSoup library.
>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> s = '''<form id="search" method="get" action="search.php">
<input type="text" name="query" value="Search"/>
<input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form> '''
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(s)
>>> k = []
>>> for i in soup.find_all('form'):
k.append(i['method'])
k.append(i['action'])
k.append([j['name'] for j in i.find_all('input', attrs={'name':True})])
>>> k
['get', 'search.php', ['query']]
re here? Just add the name argument to the list as you already are, no need to regex out the name from the element converted to a string...
xmlparsing module