Question

Sorry, another python newbie question. I have a string:

my_string = "<p>this is some \n fun</p>And this is \n some more fun!"

I would like:

my_string = "<p>this is some fun</p>And this is \n some more fun!"

In other words, how do I get rid of ‘\n’ only if it occurs inside an html tag?

I have:

my_string = re.sub('<(.*?)>(.*?)\n(.*?)</(.*?)>', 'replace with what???', my_string)

Which obviously won’t work, but I’m stuck.

Answer 1

You should try using BeautifulSoup (bs4), this will allow you to parse XML tags and pages.

>>> import bs4
>>> my_string = "<p>this is some \n fun</p>And this is \n some more fun!"
>>> soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(my_string)
>>> p = soup.p.contents[0].replace('\n ','')
>>> print p

This will pull out the new line in the p tag. If the content has more than one tag, None can be used as well as a for loop, then gathering the children (using the tag.child property).

For example:

>>> tags = soup.find_all(None)
>>> for tag in tags:
...    if tag.child is None:
...        tag.child.contents[0].replace('\n ', '')
...    else:
...        tag.contents[0].replace('\n ', '')

Though, this might not work exactly the way you want it (as web pages can vary), this code can be reproduced for your needs.