python, regex to find anchor link html

Question

I need a regex in python to find a links html in a larger set of html.

so if I have:

<ul class="something">
<li id="li_id">
<a href="#" title="myurl">URL Text</a>
</li>
</ul>

I would get back:

<a href="#" title="myurl">URL Text</a>

I'd like to do it with a regex and not beautifulsoup or something similar to that. Does anyone have a snippet laying around I could use for this?

Thanks

Answer 1

you really shouldn't use regexes to parse html.. ever.

try beautifulsoup or lxml.

but... you asked. so a quick and naive version might look like this:

import re

html = """
<ul class="something">
<li id="li_id">
<a href="#" title="myurl">URL Text</a>
</li>
</ul>
"""

m = re.search('(<a .*>)', html)
if m:
    print m.group(1)

I can think of a lot of ways this would break.

Answer 2

you can try this since your requirement is simple. No need BeautifulSoup or regex

>>> s="""
... <ul class="something">
... <li id="li_id">
... <a href="#" title="myurl">URL Text</a>
... </li>
... </ul>
... """
>>> for item in s.split("</a>"):
...    if "<a href=" in item :
...        print item [ item.find("<a href=") : ] + "</a>"
...
<a href="#" title="myurl">URL Text</a>

You can include a check of '<li class="li_class">' in the if statement as desired.

Answer 3

Soup is good for you:

>>> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup('''<ul class="something">
... <li id="li_id">
... <a href="#" title="myurl">URL Text</a>
... </li>
... </ul>''')

There are many arguments you can pass to the findAll method; more here. The one line below will get you started by returning a list of all links matching some conditions.

>>> soup.findAll(href='#', title='myurl')
[<a href="#" title="myurl">URL Text</a>]

Edit: based on OP's comment, added info included:

So let's say you're interested in only tags within list elements of a certain class <li class="li_class">. You could do something like this:

>>> soup = BeautifulSoup('''<li class="li_class">
    <a href="#" title="myurl">URL Text</a>
    <a href="#" title="myurl2">URL Text2</a></li><li class="foo">
    <a href="#" title="myurl3">URL Text3</a></li>''') # just some sample html

>>> for elem in soup.findAll("li", "li_class"):
...   pprint(elem.findAll('a')) # requires `from pprint import pprint`
... 
[<a href="#" title="myurl">URL Text</a>,
 <a href="#" title="myurl2">URL Text2</a>]

Soup recipe:

1. Download the one file required.
2. Place dl'd file in site-packages dir or similar.
3. Enjoy your soup.