Question

I have a html file that contains a line:

a = '<li><a href="?id=11&amp;sort=&amp;indeks=0,3" class="">H</a></li>'

When I search:

re.findall(r'href="?(\S+)"', a)

I get expected output:

['?id=11&sort=&indeks=0,3']

However, when I add “i” to the pattern like:

re.findall(r'href="?i(\S+)"', a)

I get:

[ ]

Where’s the catch?
Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

The problem is that the ? has a special meaning and is not being matched literally.

To fix, change your regex like so:

re.findall(r'href="\?i(\S+)"', a)

Otherwise, the ? is treated as the optional modified applied to the ". This happens to work (by accident) in your first example, but doesn’t work in the second.