Regular Expression in Python - Parsing html

Question

I need to search through an html doc, find all of the spans and delete the spans and everything between them. What would a regular expression look like that would match everything between ?

Answer 1

<span.+?<\/span> will match the tags and anything in between them.

Answer 2

Use Beautifulsoup. Or be sad. HTML and regular expression don't mix.

Here's the entire program:

import urllib2
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

# Grab your html
html  = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.google.com").read()

# Create a soup object
soup  = BeautifulSoup(html)

# Find all the spans, even if they're malformed
spans = soup.findAll("span")

# Remove all the spans from the soup object
[span.extract() for span in spans]

# Dump your new HTML to stdout.
print soup

Answer 3

You have to be careful with regular expressions---they won't work if spans are nested.

BeautifulSoup looks like a nice tool.