Python string operation, extract text between html tags?

While it may be possible to parse arbitrary HTML with regular expressions, it's often a death trap. There are great tools out there for parsing HTML, including BeautifulSoup which is a Python lib that can handle broken as well as good HTML fairly well from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup as BSHTML >>> BS = BSHTML(""" ... ... JUL 28 """ ... ) >>> BS.font. Contents0.strip() u'JUL 28 Then you just need to parse the date: datetime.

Strptime(BS.font. Contents0.strip(), '%b %d') >>> datetime. Datetime(1900, 7, 28, 0, 0) datetime.

Datetime(1900, 7, 28, 0, 0).

While it may be possible to parse arbitrary HTML with regular expressions, it's often a death trap. There are great tools out there for parsing HTML, including BeautifulSoup, which is a Python lib that can handle broken as well as good HTML fairly well. >>> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup as BSHTML >>> BS = BSHTML(""" ... ... JUL 28 """ ... ) >>> BS.font.

Contents0.strip() u'JUL 28' Then you just need to parse the date: >>> datetime. Strptime(BS.font. Contents0.strip(), '%b %d') >>> datetime.

Datetime(1900, 7, 28, 0, 0) datetime. Datetime(1900, 7, 28, 0, 0).

Nice! This seems much less complicated than the regex way. – Flux Capacitor Oct 27 at 4:12 @FluxCapacitor A word of warning: My second argument to strptime above is actually a locale-specific example.

Please refer to the documentation for more details if you need a locale-agnostic or different locale solution. – kojiro Oct 27 at 4:14.

You have a bunch of options here. You could go for an all-out xml parser like lxml, though you seem to want a domain-specific solution. I'd go with a multiline regex: import re rex = re.

Compile(r'(.*? )',re. S|re.

M) ... data = """ JUL 28 """ match = rex. Match(data) if match: text = match.groups()0.strip() Now that you have text, you can turn it into a date pretty easily: from datetime import datetime date = datetime. Strptime(text, "%b %d").

You commented on AnthonyHurst's answer that this is from a website. I've used lxml's html parsing with a lot of success recently, I highly recommend it. – fahhem Oct 27 at 4:01 Thanks!

I had seen something similar with regular expressions in another question, but wasn't able to make it work. Your solution worked for me perfectly. The downside is that I only sort of understand what's going on with it.

– Flux Capacitor Oct 27 at 4:09.

Or, you could simply use Beautiful Soup: Beautiful Soup is a Python HTML/XML parser designed for quick turnaround projects like screen-scraping.

Probably overkill but a good choice if there's more HTML parsing to be done. – Brendan Long Oct 27 at 4:04.

Grep "*>(.*)*>" file The (.*) should match your content.

I'm doing all this in Python... I used scrapy to scrape a webpage and drill down to arrive at the string above. – Flux Capacitor Oct 27 at 3:57 sorry then I couldn't assist you better. You could always use the re (regular expression) library to grab the same thing.

– AnthonyHurst Oct 27 at 4:01.

Use Scrapy's XPath selectors as documented at doc.scrapy.org/en/0.10.3/topics/selector... Alternatively you can utilize an HTML parser such as BeautifulSoup especially if want to operate on the document in an object oriented manner. pypi.python.org/pypi/BeautifulSoup/3.2.0.

Python has a library called HTMLParser. Also see the following question posted in SO which is very similar to what you are looking for: How can I use the python HTMLParser library to extract data from a specific div tag?

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