My input is similar to this:
<a href="link">text</a> <a href="correctLink">See full summary</a> From this string i want to get only correctLink (the link that has See full summary as text) .
I'm working with python, and i tried:
re.compile( '<a href="(.*?)">See full summary</a>', re.DOTALL | re.IGNORECASE ) but the only string i get with findall() is link">text</a> <a href="correctLink.
Where is my mistake?
Limit your link pattern to non-quote characters:
re.compile('<a href="([^"]+?)">See full summary</a>', re.DOTALL | re.IGNORECASE) giving:
>>> import re >>> patt = re.compile('<a href="([^"]+?)">See full summary</a>', re.DOTALL | re.IGNORECASE) >>> patt.findall('<a href="link">text</a> <a href="correctLink">See full summary</a>') ['correctLink'] Better yet, use a proper HTML parser.
Using BeautifulSoup, finding that link would be as easy as:
soup.find('a', text='See full summary')['href'] for an exact text match:
>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup >>> soup=BeautifulSoup('<a href="link">text</a> <a href="correctLink">See full summary</a>') >>> soup.find('a', text='See full summary')['href'] u'correctLink' 