Question

How to find all words except the ones in tags using RE module?

I know how to find something, but how to do it opposite way? Like I write something to search for, but acutally I want to search for every word except everything inside tags and tags themselves?

So far I managed this:

f = open (filename,'r')
data = re.findall(r"<.+?>", f.read())

Well it prints everything inside <> tags, but how to make it find every word except thats inside those tags?
I tried ^, to use at the start of pattern inside [], but then symbols as . are treated literally without special meaning.
Also I managed to solve this, by splitting string, using '''\= <>"''', then checking whole string for words that are inside <> tags (like align, right, td etc), and appending words that are not inside <> tags in another list. But that a bit ugly solution.

Is there some simple way to search for every word except anything that’s inside <> and these tags themselves?
So let say string 'hello 123 <b>Bold</b> <p>end</p>'
with re.findall, would return:

['hello', '123', 'Bold', 'end']

Answer 1

Something like re.compile(r'<[^>]+>').sub('', string).split() should do the trick.

You might want to read this post about processing context-free languages using regular expressions.