使用正则表达式解析HTML表行

Question

i have gone though this post why not use regular expression for HTML . As a part of the task given to me, i had no choice but to use regular expression for HTML.

i have HTML code and separately tried like

 <td class="a-nowrap">

          <span class="a-letter-space"></span><span>13</span>

        </td>

i have been able to get the 13 using following regular expression :

<td class="a-nowrap">\s*<span class="a-letter-space"></span><span>(\d*)</span>\s*</td>

and similarly from

<td class="a-nowrap">

          <a class="a-link-normal" title="69% of reviews have 5 stars" href="">5 star</a><span class="a-letter-space"></span>          

        </td>

got 5 star using the regular expression

<td class="a-nowrap">\s*<a class="a-link-normal" [^>]*>\s*(.*)</a>\s*</td>

But when both of the HTML code is combined like,

<table id="histogramTable" class="a-normal a-align-middle a-spacing-base">

  <tr class="a-histogram-row">



        <td class="a-nowrap">

          <a class="a-link-normal" title="69% of reviews have 5 stars" href="">5 star</a><span class="a-letter-space"></span>          

        </td>

        <td class="a-span10">

          <a class="a-link-normal" title="69% of reviews have 5 stars" href=""><div class="a-meter"><div class="a-meter-bar" style="width: 69.1358024691358%;"></div></div></a>

        </td>

        <td class="a-nowrap">

          <span class="a-letter-space"></span><span>13</span>

        </td>

  </tr>
  <td class="a-nowrap">

      <a class="a-link-normal" title="2% of reviews have 1 stars" href="">1 star</a><span class="a-letter-space"></span>          

    </td>

    <td class="a-span10">

      <a class="a-link-normal" title="2% of reviews have 1 stars" href=""><div class="a-meter"><div class="a-meter-bar" style="width: 2.46913580246914%;"></div></div></a>

    </td>

    <td class="a-nowrap">

      <span class="a-letter-space"></span><span>2</span>

    </td>


</table>

how to extract 5 star and 13 using regular expression?

Answer 1

If you don't want to use HTML parser, use one regex after another or add .* this between two patterns, I have modified a bit your star regex as it didn't work properly:

First enable dotall flag (s) and then use this:

<td class="a-nowrap">\s*<a class="a-link-normal" [^>]*>\s*(\d star).*<td class="a-nowrap">\s*<span class="a-letter-space"></span><span>(\d*)</span>\s*</td>

Output:

Group 1: 5 star

Group 2: 13

EDIT:

I have made shorter regex:

REGEX:

>(\d star)<.+?>(\d+?)<

Which used on pythonregex.com with the edited input you have provided gives:

OUTPUT:

>>> regex.findall(string)
[(u'5 star', u'13'), (u'1 star', u'2')]