Home/ Questions/Q 8936007
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-15T10:07:05+00:00

Hi I have a regex expression <a href=(.+?) class=nextpostslink> This Regex works fine on

  • 0

Hi I have a regex expression
<a href="(.+?)" class="nextpostslink">

This Regex works fine on the following html
'>
<span class='pages'>Page 1 of 12</span><span class='current'>1</span><a href='http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/page/2/' class='page larger'>2</a><a href='http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/page/3/' class='page larger'>3</a><a href='http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/page/4/' class='page larger'>4</a><a href='http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/page/5/' class='page larger'>5</a><a href="http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/page/2/" class="nextpostslink">&raquo;</a><span class='extend'>...</span><a href='http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/page/12/' class='last'>Last &raquo;</a>
</div> </div>

The part I am trying to extract is the next page url from
<a href="http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/page/2/" class="nextpostslink">

But when I run this regex on this block of HTML
'>
<span class='pages'>Page 2 of 12</span><a href="http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/" class="previouspostslink">&laquo;</a><a href='http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/' class='page smaller'>1</a><span class='current'>2</span><a href='http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/page/3/' class='page larger'>3</a><a href='http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/page/4/' class='page larger'>4</a><a href='http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/page/5/' class='page larger'>5</a><a href="http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/page/3/" class="nextpostslink">&raquo;</a><span class='extend'>...</span><a href='http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/page/12/' class='last'>Last &raquo;</a>
</div>
</div>

It extracts everything from the first <a href=" to " class="nextpostslink">
Why does this happen? I thought (.+?) was non greedy, so it should extract the minimal amount.
Which should be <a href="http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/page/3/" class="nextpostslink">

The complete python code im using is
match=re.compile('<a href="(.+?)" class="nextpostslink">', re.DOTALL).findall(pagenav)

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    As I understand it, the greediness works from the beginning of the regex–i.e., it finds <a href=", and then the non-greediness has it stop at the first " class="nextpostslink"> instead of the last one, like the greedy version would do.

    You’re best off using BeautifulSoup here:

    from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as BS
soup = BS(html)
print soup.find("a", "nextpostslink").attrs['href']
# returns u'http://cinemassacre.com/category/avgn/page/2/'
    • 0