Question

I’ve been trying (unsuccessfully) to solve this problem for a few hours and need some help. I used Firebug to extract a couple hundred lines of HTML that look like this:

<option value="1b4f4aed-cf1f-4b39-ae27">Foo</option>
<option value="1a05f93f-dd51-449d-b039">Bar</option>
<option value="f62d2d29-29fc-4f7c-9331">Bacon</option>

I saved the lines to a text file. What I want is a (Python preferred, with Ruby as an alternative) script to open process and close the file. The processing should result in a new text file being saved that looks like this:

Foo
Bar
Bacon

That’s it. Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

Per your comment above, I would suggest BeautifulSoup with anything HTML related. Since you are early in your learning stage, probably best to associate ‘HTML’ with ‘BeautifulSoup’ (and not regex 🙂 ). Here is a very basic example:

In [1]: from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

In [2]: html = """
<option value="1b4f4aed-cf1f-4b39-ae27">Foo</option>
<option value="1a05f93f-dd51-449d-b039">Bar</option>
<option value="f62d2d29-29fc-4f7c-9331">Bacon</option>
"""

In [3]: soup = BeautifulSoup(html)

In [4]: for option in soup.find_all('option'):
   ...:     print option.text
   ...:     
Foo
Bar
Bacon

Here we pass our HTML to BeautifulSoup and assign it to the soup variable. Now we have an object that contains our HTML and a large amount of methods for interacting with it in a user-friendly way. Here, we use the find_all method (documentation here) to find all option tags in our HTML. Now when we iterate, we are iterating through Tag objects, which have their own special properties/methods. Here we pick one of them (.text) to display the text of the Tag element (which in this case will be the text enclosed in the tag).