Question

I have a “problem” with BeautifulSoup and more especially with re module
Here is the problem:

import re

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

string = """
<div id="my_id">
    <ul>
        <li>something</li>
        <li class="color12">something</li>
        <li class="color45">something else</li>
    </ul>
</div>
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(string)
li = soup.find_all('li', {'class': re.compile('color(\d+)')} )
for ele in li:
    print ele['class'] # will print colorXXXX but i would like to know how to get only this XXXX

But i would like to extract only the number after color. Is it possible or do I have the obligation to use something like :

match = re.search(r'color(\d+)', str(ele['class']))
if match:
    print match.group(1)

Thank you for helping 🙂

Answer 1

You’ll have to re-apply the regular expression. Just store it in variable and reuse:

colorpattern = re.compile(r'color(\d+)')

li = soup.find_all('li', {'class': colorpattern} )
for ele in li:
    print colorpattern.search(ele['class']).group(1)