I want to use regex to replace <p ....> by '' and </p> by <br>:
<p style="text-align:center;">1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, ...<\p>
I tried:
re.sub("[\<\[].*?[\\>\\]]", '' '', x)
but it erased everything.
Can someone help me?
2 Answers
You should never use regexes for XML/HTML. XML is good at nesting tags, and nested tags are a nightmare for regexes. You should go with lxml of BeautifoulSoup here.
That being said, for very simple use cases, regexes can do the jobs, provided you can make sure that no nesting can occur.
Assuming that you have (note the /p instead of \p):
x = '<p style="text-align:center;">1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, ...</p>'
you can use:
>>> re.sub(r'<p.*?>(.*?)</p>', r'\1<br/>', x)
'1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, ...<br/>'
Comments
One option could be to use a capturing group to get the text out of the tag, then add a <br> to the end:
pat = re.compile(r'<p[^>]*>(.*)<\\p>') # or </p>, as required
print(" {}<br>".format(pat.match(x).group(1)))
# 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, ...<br>
Or you could do two replacements
pat1 = re.compile(r'<p[^>]*>')
pat2 = re.compile(r'<\\p>')
pat1.sub(' ', pat2.sub('<br>', x))
# 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, ...<br>
]at the end of your regex