Question

I want to extract the data between <tr> tags from an html page. I used the following code.But i didn’t get any result. The html between the <tr> tags is in multiple lines

category =re.findall('<tr>(.*?)</tr>',data);

Please suggest a fix for this problem.

Answer 1

just to clear up the issue. Despite all those links to re.M it wouldn’t work here as simple skimming of the its explanation would reveal. You’d need re.S, if you wouldn’t try to parse html, of course:

>>> doc = """<table border="1">
    <tr>
        <td>row 1, cell 1</td>
        <td>row 1, cell 2</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>row 2, cell 1</td>
        <td>row 2, cell 2</td>
    </tr>
</table>"""

>>> re.findall('<tr>(.*?)</tr>', doc, re.S)
['\n        <td>row 1, cell 1</td>\n        <td>row 1, cell 2</td>\n    ', 
 '\n        <td>row 2, cell 1</td>\n        <td>row 2, cell 2</td>\n    ']
>>> re.findall('<tr>(.*?)</tr>', doc, re.M)
[]