Question

I have the following text:

xml = '''
<accessibility_info>
    <accessibility role="captions" available="true" />
</accessibility_info>
<crew_member billing="top"
    <display_name>John Viscount</display_name>
</crew_member>
<products>
    <territory>GB</territory>
</products>'''

I need to remove the following <crew_member> block. This is what I am currently doing:

clean_xml = re.sub('<crew_member>.*</crew_member>', '', metadata_contents, 
                    flags=re.DOTALL)

However, it is also adding a newline:

<accessibility_info>
    <accessibility role="captions" available="true" />
</accessibility_info>

<products>
    <territory>GB</territory>
</products>

How would I change the regex to strip the newline as well, so it looks like:

<accessibility_info>
    <accessibility role="captions" available="true" />
</accessibility_info>
<products>
    <territory>GB</territory>
</products>'

Answer 1

try this

print re.sub('<crew_member([^\>]*)>.*</crew_member>\n', '', xml, flags=re.DOTALL)