Question

I have to write a program to remove all expressions of the form <word> and </word> where word is any sequence of letters (lower and upper case) and
Remove all expressions of the form <word ..... > and </word> where word is the same as before. For example, remove <a href=”wwang3.htm” class=”c l”>

Until now my code looks like this:

def remove_1( file_location ):
    """"""

    import re
    file_variable = open( file_location )
    lines = file_variable.read()

    p = re.findall('<.*?>', lines)
    print p

    substitution = re.compile('<.*?>')
    print substitution.subn( ' ', p )

I get an error that points to the print.substitution.subn( ' ', p) in which it says that I expected a string or buffer while running the program. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You are trying to substitute into the string “p”. However, p is the result of findall which is a list.

I would suggest doing it like this:

lines = file_variable.read()
print re.subn('<.*?>', ' ', line)