I want to find the letters between <b> and </b> for the following string using regular expression.
s = "start<b>A</b><b>B</b><b>C</b><b>D</b>End"
The desired result is A B C D
I tried with these codes...
for i in range(4):
r = re.search(r'.<b>.</b>.' ,"", s)
print r
I also tried many other methods. But they all dont work.
Please dont give me minus, I understand it is a very beginners question. Thanks for your help.
Use re.findall to find all occurrences of a regex that includes <b>, the intermediate characters, and </b>:
import re
s = "start<b>A</b><b>B</b><b>C</b><b>D</b>End"
for match in re.findall(r'<b>(.*?)</b>', s):
print match,
The parentheses in the regex serve to create a group, telling findall that you are interested in the stuff between <b> and </b>.
The .*? part of the regular expression means match zero or more characters, preferring the smallest string that satisfies the expression.
Here is a sample regex that will match
>>> import re
>>> p = re.compile(r'<b>(.+?)</b>')
>>> p.findall("start<b>A</b><b>B</b><b>C</b><b>D</b>End")
['A', 'B', 'C', 'D']
Use the re.findall function.
>>> m = re.findall(r'<b>(.+?)</b>', s)
>>> m
['A', 'B', 'C', 'D']
>>> ' '.join(m)
'A B C D'
Since this is XML you are parsing (at least it looks like), why don't use an XML parser, like the xml.etree.ElementTree from the Python standard library:
In [1]: import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
In [2]: s = "start<b>A</b><b>B</b><b>C</b><b>D</b>End"
In [3]: root = ET.fromstring("<root>%s</root>" % s)
In [4]: [b.text for b in root.findall("b")]
Out[4]: ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D']
print(re.findall("<b>([A-Z])<\/b>",s))