python extract contents of regex

Question

hello,

I want a regular expression to extract the title from a HTML page. Currently I have this:

title = re.search('<title>.*</title>', html, re.IGNORECASE).group()
if title:
    title = title.replace('<title>', '').replace('</title>', '')

Is there a regular expression that will extract just the contents of so I don't have to remove the tags?

thanks!

Answer 1

Try:

title = re.search('<title>(.*)</title>', html, re.IGNORECASE).group(1)

Answer 2

re.search('<title>(.*)</title>', s, re.IGNORECASE).group(1)

Answer 3

Use ( ) and group(1) (re.search will return None if it doesn't find the result, so don't use group() directly):

title_search = re.search('<title>(.*)</title>', html, re.IGNORECASE)

if title_search:
    title = title_search.group(1)

Answer 4

Try using capturing groups:

title = re.search('<title>(.*)</title>', html, re.IGNORECASE).group(1)

Answer 5

Please, do NOT use regex to parse markup languages. Use lxml or beautifulsoup.

Answer 6

Using regular expressions to parse the HTML is generally not a good idea. You can use any HTML parser like Beautiful Soup for that. Check out http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/documentation.html

Also remember that some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

Answer 7

Don't use regular expressions for HTML parsing in Python. Use an HTML parser! (Unless you're going to write a full parser, which would be a of extra work when various HTML, SGML and XML parsers are already in the standard libraries.

If your handling "real world" tag soup HTML (which is frequently non-conforming to any SGML/XML validator) then use the BeautifulSoup package (which isn't in the standard libraries (yet) but is wide recommended for this purpose.