Python Regexp problem

Question

I'm trying to regexp a line from a webpage. The line is as follows:

<tr><td width=60 bgcolor='#ffffcc'><b>random Value</b></td><td align=center width=80>

This is what I tried, but it doesn't seem to work, can anyone help me out? 'htmlbody' contains the html page and no, I did not forget to import 're'.

reg = re.compile("<tr><td width=60 bgcolor='#ffffcc'><b>([^<]*)</b></td><td align=center width=80>")
value = reg.search(htmlbody)
print 'Value is', value

Answer 1

This

import re

htmlbody = "<tr><td width=60 bgcolor='#ffffcc'><b>random Value</b></td><td align=center width=80>"

reg = re.compile("<tr><td width=60 bgcolor='#ffffcc'><b>([^<]*)</b></td><td align=center width=80>")
value = reg.search(htmlbody).group(1)
print 'Value is', value

prints out

Value is random Value

Is this what you want?

Answer 2

There is no surefire way to do this with a regex. 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 like HTMLParser:

#!/usr/bin/python

from HTMLParser import HTMLParser

class FindTDs(HTMLParser):
        def __init__(self):
                HTMLParser.__init__(self)
                self.level = 0

        def handle_starttag(self, tag, attrs):
                if tag == 'td':
                        self.level = self.level + 1

        def handle_endtag(self, tag):
                if tag == 'td':
                        self.level = self.level - 1

        def handle_data(self, data):
                if self.level > 0:
                        print data

find = FindTDs()

html = "<table>\n"
for i in range(3):
        html += "\t<tr>"
        for j in range(5):
                html += "<td>%s.%s</td>" % (i, j)
        html += "</tr>\n"
html += "</table>"

find.feed(html)

Answer 3

It sounds like you may want to use findall rather than search:

reg = re.compile("<tr><td width=60 bgcolor='#ffffcc'><b>([^<]*)</b></td><td align=center width=80>")
value = reg.findall(htmlbody)
print 'Found %i match(es)' % len(value)

I have to caution you, though, that regular expressions are notoriously poor at handling HTML. You're better off using a proper parser using the HTMLParser module built in to Python.