Question

Sorry if this has been asked before but I cannot find the answer anywhere..

I am trying to use regex to extract element values but the xml being pulled contains a blank line and this seems to be causing errors.

Here is one of the elements in the XML:

<entry>
    <id>http://feeds.rasset.ie/rteavgen/player/videos/show/?id=10103822</id>
    <showid>10103822</showid>
    <platform>iptv</platform>
    <published>2013-01-19T21:45:00+00:00</published>
    <updated>2013-01-19T23:41:00+00:00</updated>
    <title type="text">The Saturday Night Show</title>
    <content type="text">Chat show, presented by journalist and broadcaster Brendan O'Connor, featuring comedy, celebrity guests and live musical performances.</content>
    <category term="RTÉ One" rte:type="channel"/>
    <category term="Entertainment" rte:type="genre"/>
    <category term="None" rte:type="series"/>
    <category term="None" rte:type="episode"/>
    <category term="None" rte:type="ranking"/>
    <category term="1024" rte:type="genrelist"/>
    <category term="None" rte:type="keywordlist"/>
    <category term="1668" rte:type="progid"/>
    <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://feeds.rasset.ie/rteavgen/player/playlist?showId=10103822"/>

    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.rte.ie/player/#v=10103822"/>
    <rte:valid start="2013-01-19T21:52:12+00:00" end="2013-02-09T21:52:12+00:00"/>
    <rte:duration ms="4201061" formatted="1:10"/>
    <rte:statistics views="194"/>
    <media:title type="plain">The Saturday Night Show</media:title>
    <media:description type="plain">Chat show, presented by journalist and broadcaster Brendan O'Connor, featuring comedy, celebrity guests and live musical performances.</media:description>
    <media:player url="http://feeds.rasset.ie/rteavgen/player/player/?id=" width="400" height="300"/>
    <media:thumbnail url="http://img.rasset.ie/0006e56a.jpg" time="00:00:00+00:00"/>
    <media:restriction relationship="allow" type="country"/>
    <media:restriction relationship="disallow" type="country"/>
    <media:copyright>RTÉ</media:copyright>
</entry>

You can see between the two “link rel=” elements there is a blank line.

When I try to use this regex command it throws the Timeout! error as I’m not handling this properly (Excuse me also as my regex knowledge is almost zero).

links = (re.compile ('<showid>(.+?)</showid>\n        ' \
                         '<platform>.+?</platform>\n        ' \
                         '<published>(.+?)</published>\n        ' \
                         '<updated>.+?</updated>\n        ' \
                         '<title type="text">(.+?)</title>\n        ' \
                         '<content type="text">(.+?)</content>\n        ' \
                         '<category term="(.+?)" rte:type="channel"/>\n        ' \
                         '<category term=".+?" rte:type="genre"/>\n        ' \
                         '<category term=".+?" rte:type="series"/>\n        ' \
                         '<category term=".+?" rte:type="episode"/>\n        ' \
                         '<category term=".+?" rte:type="ranking"/>\n        ' \
                         '<category term=".+?" rte:type="genrelist"/>\n        ' \
                         '<category term=".+?" rte:type="keywordlist"/>\n        ' \
                         '<category term=".+?" rte:type="progid"/>\n        ' \
                         '<link rel="self" type=".+?" href=".+?" />\n        ' \
                         '<link rel="alternate" type=".+?" href=".+?" />').findall(data))

I only actually want a few of the fields but I can’t seem to find a regex command that allows me to just select the individual element names I want, it makes me enter each one in sequence (again, my lack of regex knowledge is the issue). There are fields that I require beyond the second “link rel=” element that I require but as it keeps falling over on this one I have left them out for now.

Anyone know what regex command I need to skip the blank line and also perhaps to tidy up the expression to only extract the elements that I require?

Thanks for your help folks, I hope…

Answer 1

You should not be using regexes for this task, as others have said.

Answering your actual question: You are being too specific about the whitespace between elements. In this case it’s extra whitespace that’s causing you a problem. It could have easily been NO whitespace:

<category term="None" rte:type="ranking"/><category term="1024" rte:type="genrelist"/>

Remedy: Instead of using \n followed by 8 spaces, use \s* (zero or more whitespace characters).