Stripping tags using regex in python

Question

How can I go about stripping the tags off this list:

['</span>A walk in the park<span class="html-tag"]

I managed to use (r'(?<=</span>)[^>]+') to remove the first tag but cant figure out how to remove the second. I know regular expressions ain't the way to go for dealing with tags but just want to figure this out.

Out of curiosity - how are you getting that string in the first place...? Almost seems like you might want to be extracting text differently earlier in some processing rather than tidying up that... — Jon Clements
– Jon Clements, Commented Oct 15, 2017 at 14:35
@JonClements I just created the above to mirror some issue i was having on a more complex task which would have been hard to explain. — West
– West, Commented Oct 15, 2017 at 15:16
sure - just seems you're trying to clear up things where it can possibly be avoided is all... — Jon Clements
– Jon Clements, Commented Oct 15, 2017 at 15:17
I know hey. Its part of a uni assignment forbidding the use of any modules other than the 're' module for web scraping. Quite silly i thought — West
– West, Commented Oct 15, 2017 at 16:54

Marc Lambrichs · Accepted Answer · 2017-10-15 14:49:20Z

1

You were quite close with your regex. After the position found by the lookbehind, you just want to read up to the next <:

(?<=</span>)[^<]+

Check it out on regex101

$ cat test.py
import re
s='</span>A walk in the park<span class="html-tag"'
print re.findall(r'(?<=</span>)[^<]+', s)

$ python test.py
['A walk in the park']

edited Oct 15, 2017 at 14:49

answered Oct 15, 2017 at 14:36

Marc Lambrichs

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Neb · Accepted Answer · 2017-10-15 14:36:17Z

1

You can use:

(?:>)(.*)(?:<)

In regex, every opened and closed round brakets defines a group. Here, we have 3 couples of rounded brackets but the first and the last one have a ?: inside. That means that the group being defined is a non-capturing group so it is needed to match the pattern but it will not be returned by the parser. Instead, what you want is in group #1.

answered Oct 15, 2017 at 14:36

Neb

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