Question

I usually use lxml to parse xml, but in this case, I just need to change the content of a single tag.

<sales_start_date>YYYY-MM-DD</sales_start_date>

YYYY-MM-DD is a variable date.

How would I replace the above to:

<sales_start_date>2013-01-01</sales_start_date>

Here is what I currently have (which sort of works)

re.sub('<sales_start_date>[\d-]+</sales_start_date>', 
       '<sales_start_date>2013-01-01</sales_start_date>', 
        data)

Answer 1

Since you know the exact tags, this is pretty simple, just grab any character until the next tag (any character not <):

re.sub('<sales_start_date>[^<]+</sales_start_date>', 
       '<sales_start_date>2013-01-01</sales_start_date>', 
        data)