How to replace string, new line and spaces together in python

Question

I have a long string called webpage contains something like this:

"<!--  \n    <div class=\"section_content\"> \n    </div>\n\n-->  "

I want to replace the comments symbol "<!--" and "-->" with spaces. However I cannot directly replace them, since there are other real comments, like "<!-- comments -->" , in the long string.

I was trying to use

re.sub(r"<!--\s+\n\s+<div",r"\n<div",webpage,flags=re.MULTILINE)

But it does not work at all. Can someone help? The result should be "\\n <div class=\\"section_content\\"> \\n </div>\\n\\n" .

Answer 1

This should do:

import re

regex = r"<!--(\s*\n\s*<div[^>]*>\s*\n\s*</div>\n\n)-->"
string = "<!--  \n    <div class=\"section_content\"> \n    </div>\n\n-->  "
res = re.sub(regex, r"\1", string)
print res

Result:

"  \n    <div class=\"section_content\"> \n    </div>\n\n"

Then, if you don't want newlines and spaces at the ends of the string you can use the .strip() method of the string object.