Question

Yes, yes, I’ve weighed using an xml parser instead of regular expressions, but this seems to be a simplistic enough case that it’s suitable:

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
from urllib import urlopen

tempSite = 'http://www.sumkindawebsiterighthur.com'
theTempSite = urlopen(tempSite).read()
currentTempSite = BeautifulSoup(theTempSite)
Email = currentTempSite.findAll('tr', valign="top") 
print Email[0] 

Currently results with:

<tr valign="top">
<td><p>Phone Number:</p></td>
<td>&nbsp;</td>
<td><p>706-878-8888</p></td>
</tr>

I’m trying to remove all markup (tr, td, p,   would be nice too) and result:

Phone Number: 706-878-8888

My problem is over-exclusion AND multiple lines being regex’d, looking for an answer that outputs on a single line.

Answer 1

If your results are really always that simple, the following regex will put ‘Phone Number:’ in capture group 1 and the number in capture group 2 as long as the re.DOTALL flag is set:

.*(Phone Number:).*?([-\d]+).*

You can then call re.sub() on your string with the replacement \1 \2.

Here is a complete example that returns what you want:

>>> s = """<tr valign="top">
... <td><p>Phone Number:</p></td>
... <td>&nbsp;</td>
... <td><p>706-878-8888</p></td>
... </tr>"""
>>> regex = re.compile(r'.*(Phone Number:).*?([-\d]+).*', re.DOTALL)
>>> regex.sub(r'\1 \2', s)
'Phone Number: 706-878-8888'