Python: Regular expression to extract text between any two tags in a html

Question

I tried using "<.+>\\s*(.*?)\\s*<\\/?.+>" on a HTML file. The following is the Python code I used

import re

def recursiveExtractor(content):
    re1='(<.+>\s*(.+?)\s*<\/?.+>)'
    m = re.findall(re1,content)
    if m:
        for (id,item) in enumerate(m):
            text=m[id][1]
            if text:print text,"\n"

f = """
<div class='a'>
      <div class='b'>
        <div class='c'>
            <button>text1</button>
            <div class='d'>text2</div>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
"""
recursiveExtractor(f)

But it skips some text since HTML is nested and regex restarts search from the end of the matched part.

For the above input, the output is

<div class='b'>

<div class='d'>text2</div>

</div>

But the expected Output is:

text1

text2

Edit: I read that HTML is not a regular language and hence cant be parsed.From what I understand, it is not possible to parse .* (ie with same closing tags). But what I need would be text between any tags, for instance text1 text2 text3 So I am fine with a list of "text1","text2","text3"

Answer 1

Why not just doing this:

import re

f = """
<div class='a'>
      <div class='b'>
        <div class='c'>
            <button>text1</button>
            <div class='d'>text2</div>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
"""
x = re.sub('<[^>]*>', '', f)  # you can also use re.sub('<[A-Za-z\/][^>]*>', '', f)

print '\n'.join(x.split())

This will have the following output:

text1
text2