Python get substrings inbetween tags

Question

I'm trying to get data from a pipe in Python. The data is structured like this:

<item><type> data </type><code> data </code><length> data </length><data encoding=“base64”> data </data></item>

How do I get the data inbetween these tags? I've already written a Base64 decoder.

Answer 1

One way is to use the lxml package and treat the raw data as a html

from lxml import html

raw_data = '<item><type> data </type><code> data </code><length> data </length><data encoding=“base64”> data </data></item>'
html_data = html.fromstring(raw_data)

data = html_data.xpath('//text()')

# data = [' data ', ' data ', ' data ', ' data ']

that may be a bit overkill, another way is using regular expression

pattern copied from https://kevin.deldycke.com/2008/07/python-ultimate-regular-expression-to-catch-html-tags/

import re

def get_data(text):
    pattern = "(?i)<\/?\w+((\s+\w+(\s*=\s*(?:\".*?\"|'.*?'|[^'\">\s]+))?)+\s*|\s*)\/?>"
    return re.sub(p, '', text).split()

text = '<item><type> data </type><code> data </code><length> data </length><data encoding=“base64”> data </data></item>'
print(get_data(text))

# ['data', 'data', 'data', 'data']