On Oct 2, 1:10 am, "504cr...@gmail.com" <504cr...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm kind of new to regular expressions, and I've spent hours trying to > finesse a regular expression to build a substitution. > > What I'd like to do is extract data elements from HTML and structure > them so that they can more readily be imported into a database. > > No -- sorry -- I don't want to use BeautifulSoup (though I have for > other projects). Humor me, please -- I'd really like to see if this > can be done with just regular expressions. > > Note that the output is referenced using named groups. > > My challenge is successfully matching the HTML tags in between the > first table row, and the second table row. > > I'd appreciate any suggestions to improve the approach. > > rText = "<tr><td valign=top>8583</td><td valign=top><a > href=lic_details.asp?lic_number=8583>New Horizon Technical Academy, > Inc #4</a></td><td valign=top>Jefferson</td><td valign=top>70114</td></ > tr><tr><td valign=top>9371</td><td valign=top><a href=lic_details.asp? > lic_number=9371>Career Learning Center</a></td><td > valign=top>Jefferson</td><td valign=top>70113</td></tr>" > > rText = re.compile(r'(<tr><td valign=top>)(?P<zlicense>\d+)(</td>)(<td > valign=top>)(<a href=lic_details.asp)(\?lic_number=\d+)(>)(?P<zname>[A- > Za-z0-9#\s\S\W]+)(</.*?>).+$').sub(r'LICENSE:\g<zlicense>|NAME: > \g<zname>\n', rText) > > print rText > > LICENSE:8583|NAME:New Horizon Technical Academy, Inc #4</a></td><td > valign=top>Jefferson</td><td valign=top>70114</td></tr><tr><td > valign=top>9371</td><td valign=top><a href=lic_details.asp? > lic_number=9371>Career Learning Center|PARISH:Jefferson|ZIP:70113
Some suggestions to start off with: * triple-quote your multiline strings * consider using the re.X, re.M, and re.S options for re.compile() * save your re object after you compile it * note that re.sub() returns a new string Also, it sounds like you want to replace the first 2 <td> elements for each <tr> element with their content separated by a pipe (throwing away the <td> tags themselves), correct? ---John -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
