Question

I want to grab the value of a hidden input field in HTML.

<input type='hidden' name='fooId' value='12-3456789-1111111111' /> 

I want to write a regular expression in Python that will return the value of fooId, given that I know the line in the HTML follows the format

<input type='hidden' name='fooId' value='**[id is here]**' /> 

Can someone provide an example in Python to parse the HTML for the value?

Answer 1

For this particular case, BeautifulSoup is harder to write than a regex, but it is much more robust… I’m just contributing with the BeautifulSoup example, given that you already know which regexp to use 🙂

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup  #Or retrieve it from the web, etc.  html_data = open('/yourwebsite/page.html','r').read()  #Create the soup object from the HTML data soup = BeautifulSoup(html_data) fooId = soup.find('input',name='fooId',type='hidden') #Find the proper tag value = fooId.attrs[2][1] #The value of the third attribute of the desired tag                            #or index it directly via fooId['value']