Python: HTML regex not matching

Question

I have this code:

reg = re.search('<div class="col result_name">(.*)</div>', html)
print 'Value is', reg.group()

Where 'html' contains something like this:

        <div class="col result_name">
            <h4>Blah</h4>
            <p>
                blah
            </p>
        </div>

But it's not returning anything.

Value is
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "run.py", line 37, in <module>
    print 'Value is', reg.group()

Answer 1

Don't use regex to parse html. Use a html parser

import lxml.html
doc = lxml.html.fromstring(your_html)
result = doc.xpath("//div[@class='col result_name']")
print result

Obligatory link:

RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags

Answer 2

点不一定与RE中的换行符匹配， DOTALL您需要DOTALL标志(?s) 。

Answer 3

http://docs.python.org/library/re.html :

The special characters are:

'.' (Dot.) In the default mode, this matches any character except a newline . If the DOTALL flag has been specified, this matches any character including a newline.