Question

I am trying to parse the keywords from google suggest, this is the url:

http://google.com/complete/search?output=toolbar&q=test

I’ve done it with php using:

'|<CompleteSuggestion><suggestion data="(.*?)"/><num_queries int="(.*?)"/></CompleteSuggestion>|is'

But that wont work with python re.match(pattern, string), I tried a few but some show error and some return None.

How can I parse that info? I dont want to use minidom because I think regex will be less code.

Answer 1

You could use etree:

>>> from xml.etree.ElementTree import XMLParser
>>> x = XMLParser()
>>> x.feed('<toplevel><CompleteSuggestion><suggestion data=...')
>>> tree = x.close()
>>> [(e.find('suggestion').get('data'), int(e.find('num_queries').get('int')))
     for e in tree.findall('CompleteSuggestion')]
[('test internet speed', 31800000), ('test', 686000000), ...]

It is more code than a regex, but it also does more. Specifically, it will fetch the entire list of matches in one go, and unescape any weird stuff like double-quotes in the data attribute. It also won’t get confused if additional elements start appearing in the XML.