Question

Assume I have the following string:

string = "** Hunger is the physical sensation of desiring food.                                      

<br>         Your Hunger Level: Very Hungery<br> Food You Crave: Tomato<br/><br/>"

I want to be able to extract out “Your Hunger” and “Tomato”. Assume that regardless of what special characters are inserted, I know for a fact that “Your Hunger Level:” and “Food You Crave” will always be constant.

"Your Hunger Level:" could be: "Very Hungry", "Hungry", "Not So Hungry"
"Food You Crave:" could be: "Tomato", "Rice and Beans", "Corn Soup"

How do I use a regular expression to match this? I tried the following, but am not getting any luck…

m = re.match('(.*)([ \t]+)?Your Hunger Level:([ \t]+)?(?P<hungerlevel>.*)(.*)Food You Crave:([ \t]+)?(?P<foodcraving>.*).*', string)                

NOTE: The string appears to have a lot of escape characters indicated below:

string = "** Hunger is the physical sensation of desiring food. <br>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tYour Hunger Level:
Very Hungry \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<br>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tFood You Crave: Tomato \n\t\t\t\t\t\t</br>"

Answer 1

I’d go for:

print [map(str.strip, line.split(':')) for line in re.split('<.*?>', string) if ':' in line]
# [['Your Hunger Level', 'Very Hungery'], ['Food You Crave', 'Tomato']]

Or, you could make it a dict:

lookup = dict(map(str.strip, line.split(':')) for line in re.split('<.*?>', text) if ':' in line)
print lookup['Your Hunger Level']
# 'Very Hungry'