Question

I’m rather new to python and programming ;-), and I’m writting a programm for scraping data from the web-site that has over 6000 lines for only 1 page, while I’m going to scrape about 20000 thousands of them. I’m using python 2.7.4

I have seen some tutorials on how to use regular expressions but it did not work for me.
I’m using Beautiful Soup for finding particular tags, actually I need to find such tags:

<tr class="room_loop_counter1 maintr">
<tr class="room_loop_counter1 extendedRow">
<tr class="room_loop_counter2 maintr odd">
<tr class="room_loop_counter2 extendedRow odd">
<tr class="room_loop_counter3 maintr">
<tr data-occupancy="2" class="room_loop_counter1 ">
<tr data-occupancy="2" class="room_loop_counter2 odd">
<tr data-occupancy="3" class="room_loop_counter3 ">
<tr data-occupancy="3" class="room_loop_counter4 odd">

etc. I’m not sure about space infront of quotes after room_loop_counter1,3.

I was trying to write an expression that would fit next line of code:

soup = BeautifulSoup(html_part)

av = soup.find_all('tr', class_=REGULAR_EXP)

REGULAR_EXP = re.compile('"room_loop_counter"\d\s.')

but I obviously write wrong regular expression for class

How to write one that will be valid?
I suppose that it should be an expression that findes all “room_loop_counter” followed by any number of characters (numbers, spaces,letters, but not new line character)
Thank you, in advance.

Answer 1

The following regex finds all “room_loop_counter” followed by any number of characters (numbers, spaces,letters, but not new line character) :

room_loop_counter[A-Za-z\d\s]*

Your regex "room_loop_counter"\d\s. matches "room_loop_counter" (note the enclosing quotes) followed by a digit, followed by a space and then any character.

So it matches "room_loop_counter"1 x and "room_loop_counter"3 ! but not "room_loop_counter1"