Python3.7: RegEx for string between strings on multiple lines?

Question

I would like to find 30,850 in:

  <div class='user-information__achievements-heading' data-test-points-title>
    Points
    </div>
    <div class='user-information__achievements-data' data-test-points-count>
    30,850
    </div>
    </div>

with:

^(?!<div class='user-information__achievements-data' data-test-points-count>
|<.div>)(.*)$

(returns nothing)

How come ^(?!START\\-OF\\-FIELDS|END\\-OF\\-FIELDS)(.*)$ does work for:

START-OF-FIELDS
<div>
Line A
END-OF-FIELDS

(returns <div> )?

Answer 1

Besides I totally agree to never parse HTML with re (and it's really fun to read, btw) if you only have this piece of text and need a quick re.search , a simple r'\\d+,\\d+' would do...:

import re

s = '''<div class='user-information__achievements-heading' data-test-points-title>
    Points
    </div>
    <div class='user-information__achievements-data' data-test-points-count>
    30,850
    </div>
    </div>'''

re.search(r'\d+,\d+', s)
<re.Match object; span=(179, 185), match='30,850'>

Answer 2

No need for regex just do:

i="    <div class='user-information__achievements-data' data-test-points-count>"
print(s.splitlines()[s.splitlines().index(i)+1].lstrip())

Output:

30,850

Answer 3

You also can search text by bs4

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

tx = """
  <div class='user-information__achievements-heading' data-test-points-title>
    Points
    </div>
    <div class='user-information__achievements-data' data-test-points-count>
    30,850
    </div>
    </div>
"""

bs = BeautifulSoup(tx,"lxml")
result = bs.find("div",{"class":"user-information__achievements-data"}).text
print(result.strip()) # 30,850

Answer 4

You want re.DOTALL because by default . doesn't match newlines and line brakes.

re.compile(YOUR_REGEX, flags=re.S)

You can also prepend your regex with (?s) for the same effect.