Question

I want to detect the src attribute of a image from the img tag from html code using python. I think regular expressions can do the job. And I created a regular expression

\<img .*src="(.*)".*/\>

But there are many possible ways to use img tag such as

<img src="images/first.png" alt="" />
<img src="images/first.png" alt="">
<img  alt="" src="images/first.png" />
<img  alt="" width="100" src="images/first.png" height="200">

So my question is, Is the above regular expression enough for the task ?
Can any one give a better option ?

Answer 1

Use a HTML parser instead, Python has several to choose from:

• ElementTree is part of the standard library
• BeautifulSoup is a popular 3rd party library
• lxml is a fast and feature-rich C-based library.

ElementTree example:

from xml.etree import ElementTree

tree = ElementTree.parse('filename.html')
for elem in tree.findall('img'):
    print elem['src']