Trying to understand html.parser.HTMLParser

[Andrew Berg]

On 2011.05.16 02:26 AM, Karim wrote:
> Use regular expression for bad HTLM or beautifulSoup (google it), below 
> a exemple to extract all html links:
Actually, using regex wasn't so bad:
> import re
> import urllib.request
>
> url = 'http://x264.nl/x264/?dir=./64bit/8bit_depth'
> page = str(urllib.request.urlopen(url).read(), encoding='utf-8') #
> urlopen() returns a bytes object, need to get a normal string
> rev_re = re.compile('revision[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]')
> num_re = re.compile('[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]')
> rev = rev_re.findall(str(page))[0] # only need the first item since
> the first listing is the latest revision
> num = num_re.findall(rev)[0] # findall() always returns a list
> print(num)
prints out the revision number - 1995. 'revision1995' might be useful,
so I saved that to rev.

This actually works pretty well for consistently formatted lists. I
suppose I went about this the wrong way - I thought I needed to parse
the HTML to get the links and do simple regexes on those, but I can just
do simple regexes on the entire HTML document.