Regular expression to extract URL from an HTML link

Question

Im newbie in Python, i learning regex, but need help here

Heres comes the source

<a href="http://www.ptop.se" target="_blank">http://www.ptop.se&lt;/a&gt;

I trying to code a tool that only prints out http://ptop.se, Can you help me please?

Answer 1

Don't use regexes, use BeautifulSoup. That, or be so crufty as to spawn it out to, say, w3m/lynx and pull back in what w3m/lynx renders. First is more elegant probably, second just worked a heck of a lot faster on some unoptimized code I wrote a while back.

Answer 2

this should work, although there might be more elegant ways.

import re
url='<a href="http://www.ptop.se" target="_blank">http://www.ptop.se&lt;/a&gt;'
r = re.compile('(?<=href=").*?(?=")')
r.findall(url)

Answer 3

If you're only looking for one:

import re
match = re.search(r'href=[\'"]?([^\'" >]+)', s)
if match:
    print match.group(0)

If you have a long string, and want every instance of the pattern in it:

import re
urls = re.findall(r'href=[\'"]?([^\'" >]+)', s)
print ', '.join(urls)

Where s is the string that you're looking for matches in.

Quick explanation of the regexp bits:

r'...' is a "raw" string. It stops you having to worry about escaping characters quite as much as you normally would. (\ especially -- in a raw string a \ is just a \. In a regular string you'd have to do \\ every time, and that gets old in regexps.)

"href=[\'"]?" says to match "href=", possibly followed by a ' or ". "Possibly" because it's hard to say how horrible the HTML you're looking at is, and the quotes aren't strictly required.

Enclosing the next bit in "()" says to make it a "group", which means to split it out and return it separately to us. It's just a way to say "this is the part of the pattern I'm interested in."

"[^\'" >]+" says to match any characters that aren't ', ", >, or a space. Essentially this is a list of characters that are an end to the URL. It lets us avoid trying to write a regexp that reliably matches a full URL, which can be a bit complicated.

The suggestion in another answer to use BeautifulSoup isn't bad, but it does introduce a higher level of external requirements. Plus it doesn't help you in your stated goal of learning regexps, which I'd assume this specific html-parsing project is just a part of.

It's pretty easy to do:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_to_parse)
for tag in soup.findAll('a', href=True):
    print tag['href']

Once you've installed BeautifulSoup, anyway.

Answer 4

There's tonnes of them on regexlib

Answer 5

Yes, there are tons of them on regexlib. That only proves that RE's should not be used to do that. Use SGMLParser or BeautifulSoup or write a parser - but don't use RE's. The ones that seems to work are extremely compliated and still don't cover all cases.

Answer 6

Regexes are fundamentally bad at parsing HTML (see Can you provide some examples of why it is hard to parse XML and HTML with a regex? for why). What you need is an HTML parser. See Can you provide an example of parsing HTML with your favorite parser? for examples using a variety of parsers.

In particular you will want to look at the Python answers: BeautifulSoup, HTMLParser, and lxml.

Answer 7

John Gruber (who wrote Markdown, which is made of regular expressions and is used right here on Stack Overflow) had a go at producing a regular expression that recognises URLs in text:

http://daringfireball.net/2009/11/liberal_regex_for_matching_urls

If you just want to grab the URL (i.e. you’re not really trying to parse the HTML), this might be more lightweight than an HTML parser.

Answer 8

This improved version should work as reliably as a parser.

   // Applies to URI, not just URL or URN:
   //    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier#Relationship_to_URL_and_URN
   //
   // http://labs.apache.org/webarch/uri/rfc/rfc3986.html#regexp
   //
   // (?:([^:/?#]+):)?(?://([^/?#]*))?([^?#]*)(?:\?([^#]*))?(?:#(.*))?
   //
   // http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI_scheme#Generic_syntax
   //
   // $@ matches the entire uri
   // $1 matches scheme (ftp, http, mailto, mshelp, ymsgr, etc)
   // $2 matches authority (host, user:pwd@host, etc)
   // $3 matches path
   // $4 matches query (http GET REST api, etc)
   // $5 matches fragment (html anchor, etc)
   //
   // Match specific schemes, non-optional authority, disallow white-space so can delimit in text, and allow 'www.' w/o scheme
   // Note the schemes must match ^[^\s|:/?#]+(?:\|[^\s|:/?#]+)*$
   //
   // (?:()(www\.[^\s/?#]+\.[^\s/?#]+)|(schemes)://([^\s/?#]*))([^\s?#]*)(?:\?([^\s#]*))?(#(\S*))?
   //
   // Validate the authority with an orthogonal RegExp, so the RegExp above won’t fail to match any valid urls.
   function uriRegExp( flags, schemes/* = null*/, noSubMatches/* = false*/ )
   {
      if( !schemes )
         schemes = '[^\\s:\/?#]+'
      else if( !RegExp( /^[^\s|:\/?#]+(?:\|[^\s|:\/?#]+)*$/ ).test( schemes ) )
         throw TypeError( 'expected URI schemes' )
      return noSubMatches ? new RegExp( '(?:www\\.[^\\s/?#]+\\.[^\\s/?#]+|' + schemes + '://[^\\s/?#]*)[^\\s?#]*(?:\\?[^\\s#]*)?(?:#\\S*)?', flags ) :
         new RegExp( '(?:()(www\\.[^\\s/?#]+\\.[^\\s/?#]+)|(' + schemes + ')://([^\\s/?#]*))([^\\s?#]*)(?:\\?([^\\s#]*))?(?:#(\\S*))?', flags )
   }

   // http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI_scheme#Official_IANA-registered_schemes
   function uriSchemesRegExp()
   {
      return 'about|callto|ftp|gtalk|http|https|irc|ircs|javascript|mailto|mshelp|sftp|ssh|steam|tel|view-source|ymsgr'
   }