Question

I am trying to use regex to parse a site for

blahblahblah 
<a  href="THIS IS WHAT I WANT" title="NOT THIS">I DONT CARE ABOUT THIS EITHER</a>
blahblahblah 

(there are many of these, and I want all of them in some tokenized form). The problem is that “a href” actually has TWO spaces, not just one (there are some that are “a href” with one space that I do NOT want to retrieve), so using LXML has proven to be quite a pain and I do not want to use BeautifulSoup (for other reasons). Does anyone know how I might go about doing this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I believe this answers your question. It is just a couple of regular expressions that will get all of the href’s that are exactly two spaces after an opening ‘a’ tag.

fh = open("index.html", 'r')
rawString = fh.read()   # read entire file to string
fh.close()

temp =  re.findall("<a  href=\".*?\"", rawString) 
if temp:
    for i in range(len(temp)): # process each match
        temp[i] = re.search("\".*?\"", temp[i]).group(0) # remove 'href='
    print temp    
else:
    print "Not found"

For your example the output is:

[‘”THIS IS WHAT I WANT”‘]