Question

I’ve just began learning Python and I’ve ran into a small problem.
I need to parse a text file, more specifically an HTML file (but it’s syntax is so weird – divs after divs after divs, the result of a Google’s ‘View as HTML’ for a certain PDF i can’t seem to extract the text because it has a messy table done in m$ word).

Anyway, I chose a rather low-level approach because i just need the data asap and since I’m beginning to learn Python, I figured learning the basics would do me some good too.

I’ve got everything done except for a small part in which i need to retrieve a set of integers from a set of divs. Here’s an example:

<div style="position:absolute;top:522;left:1020"><nobr>*88</nobr></div>

Now the numbers i want to retrieve all the ones inside <nobr></nobr> (in that case, ‘588’) and, since it’s quite a messy file, i have to make sure that what I am getting is correct. To do so, that number inside <nobr></nobr> must be preceded by "left:1020", "left:1024" or "left:1028". This is because of the automatic conversion and the best choice would be to get all the number preceded by left:102[0-] in my opinion.

To do so, I was trying to use:

for o in re.finditer('left:102[0-9]"><nobr>(.*?)</nobr></div>', words[index])
    out = o.group(1)

But so far, no such luck… How can I get those numbers?

Thanks in advance,
J.

Answer 1

Don’t use regular expressions to parse HTML. BeautifulSoup will make light work of this.

As for your specific problem, it might be that you are missing a colon at the end of the first line:

for o in re.finditer('left:102[0-9]"><nobr>(.*?)</nobr></div>', words[index]):
    out = o.group(1)

If this isn’t the problem, please post the error you are getting, at what you expect the output to be.