Question

I need to get info from a website that outputs it between <font color="red">needed-info-here</font> OR <span style="font-weight:bold;">needed-info-here</span>, randomly.

I can get it when I use

start = '<font color="red">'
end = '</font>'
expression = start + '(.*?)' + end
match = re.compile(expression).search(web_source_code)
needed_info = match.group(1)

, but then I have to pick to fetch either <font> or <span>, failing, when the site uses the other tag.

How do I modify the regular expression so it would always succeed?

Answer 1

You can join two alternatives with a vertical bar:

start = '<font color="red">|<span style="font-weight:bold;">'
end = '</font>|</span>'

since you know that a font tag will always be closed by </font>, a span tag always by </span>.

However, consider also using a solid HTML parser such as BeautifulSoup, rather than rolling your own regular expressions, to parse HTML, which is particularly unsuitable in general for getting parsed by regular expressions.