Matching tags in BeautifulSoup

Question

I'm trying to count the number of tags in the 'soup' from a beautifulsoup result. I'd like to use a regular expression but am having trouble. The code Ive tried is as follows:

reg_exp_tag = re.compile("<[^>*>")
tags = re.findall(reg_exp_tag, soup(cast as a string))

but re will not allow reg_exp_tag, giving an unexpected end of regular expression error.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks

Answer 1

Shouldn't that be "<[^>]*>" instead of "<[^>*>"?

(the class needs to be closed with a ])

Answer 2

If you've already parsed the HTML with BeautifulSoup, why parse it again? Try this:

num_tags = len(soup.findAll())