Question

Is there a more succinct/correct/pythonic way to do the following:

url = "http://0.0.0.0:3000/authenticate/login"
re_token = re.compile("<[^>]*authenticity_token[^>]*value=\"([^\"]*)")
for line in urllib2.urlopen(url):
    if re_token.match(line):
        token = re_token.findall(line)[0]
        break

I want to get the value of the input tag named “authenticity_token” from an HTML page:

<input name="authenticity_token" type="hidden" value="WTumSWohmrxcoiDtgpPRcxUMh/D9m7O7T6HOhWH+Yw4=" />

Answer 1

Could you use Beautiful Soup for this? The code would essentially look something like so:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
url = "hhttp://0.0.0.0:3000/authenticate/login"
page = urlli2b.urlopen(page)
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
token = soup.find("input", { 'name': 'authenticity_token'})

Something like that should work. I didn’t test this but you can read the documentation to get it exact.