Question

I have an html file and I want to replace the empty paragraphs with a space.

mystring = "This <p></p><p>is a test</p><p></p><p></p>"
result = mystring.sub("<p></p>" , "&nbsp;")

This is not working.

Answer 1

Please, don’t try to parse HTML with regular expressions. Use a proper parsing module, like htmlparser or BeautifulSoup to achieve this. “Suffer” a short learning curve now and benefit:

1. Your parsing code will be more robust, handling corner cases you may not have considered that will fail with a regex
2. For future HTML parsing/munging tasks, you will be empowered to do things faster, so eventually the time investment pays off as well.

You won’t be sorry! Profit guaranteed!