It's been a while since I've used regex, and I feel like this should be simple to figure out.
I have a web page full of links that looks like the string_to_match in the below code. I want to grab just the numbers in the links, like number "58" in the string_to_match. For the life of me I can't figure it out.
import re
string_to_match = '<a href="/ncf/teams/roster?teamId=58">Roster</a>'
re.findall('<a href="/ncf/teams/roster?teamId=(/d+)">Roster</a>',string_to_match)
Instead of using regular expressions, you can use a combination of HTML parsing (using BeautifulSoup parser) to locate the desired link and extract the href attribute value and URL parsing, which in this case, we'll use regular expressions for:
import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
data = """
<body>
<a href="/ncf/teams/roster?teamId=58">Roster</a>
</body>
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(data, "html.parser")
link = soup.find("a", text="Roster")["href"]
print(re.search(r"teamId=(\d+)", link).group(1))
Prints 58.
I would recommend using BeautifulSoup or lxml, it's worth the learning curve.
...But if you still want to use regexp
re.findall('href="[^"]*teamId=(\d+)',string_to_match)
GETparameters, which will be correct and largely self-documenting code. Even if the regex might be faster, unmaintainable and possibly wrong code is not an improvement.