Question

So im just experimenting, trying to parse through the web using python and i thought i would try to make a script that would search for my favorite links to watch shows online. Im trying to now have my program search through sidereel.com for a good link to my desired show and return to me the links. I know that the site saves the links in the following format:

watch-freeseries.mu’then some long string that i need to ignore followed by ‘14792088’

So what i need to be able to do is to find this string in the txt file of the site and return to me only the 8 numbers at the end of the string. I not sure how i can get to the numbers and i need them because they are the link number. Any help would be much appreciated

Answer 1

You could use a regular expression to do this fairly easily.

>>> import re
>>> text = "watch-freeseries.mu=lklsflamflkasfmsaldfasmf14792088"
>>> expr = re.compile("watch\-freeseries\.mu.*?(\d{8})")
>>> expr.findall(text)
['14792088']

A breakdown of the expression:

watch\-freeseries\.mu – Match the start of the expected expression. Escape any possible special characters by preceding them with \.

.*? – Match any character. . means any character and * means that appear one after the other an infinite amount of times. The ? is to perform a non-greedy match so that the match will not overlap if two or more urls show up in the same string.

(\d{8}) – Match and save the last 8 digits

Note: If you’re trying to parse links out of a webpage there are easier ways. I’ve seen many recommendations on StackOverflow for the BeautifulSoup package in particular. I’ve never used it myself so YMMV.