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
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:
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.
/(<a .*?</a>)/. And yes, it breaks on pretty much everything.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.
