从嘈杂的字符串中提取文本。

Question

I have some html documents and I want to extract a very particular text from it. Now, this text is always located as

<div class = "fix">text </div>

Now, sometimes what happens is... there are other opening divs as well...something like:

 <div class = "fix"> part of text <div something> other text </div> some more text </div>

Now.. I want to extract all the text corresponding to

 <div class = "fix">                     </div> markups??

How do i do this?

Answer 1

I would use the BeautifulSoup libraries. They're kinda built for this, as long your data is correct html it should find exactly what you're looking for. They've got reasonably good documentation, and it's extremely straight forward, even for beginners. If your file is on the web somewhere where you can't access the direct html, grab the html with urllib.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc)
soup.find({"class":"fix"})

If there is more than one item with it use find_all instead. This should give you what you're looking for (roughly).

Edit: Fixed example (class is a keyword, so you can't use the usual (attr="blah")

Answer 2

Here's a really simple solution that uses a non-greedy regex to remove all html tags.:

import re
s =  "<div class = \"fix\"> part of text <div something> other text </div> some more text </div>"
s_text = re.sub(r'<.*?>', '', s)

The values are then:

print(s)
<div class = "fix"> part of text <div something> other text </div> some more text </div>
print(s_text)
 part of text  other text  some more text