Suitable Python code to scrape specific details from web pages.

[Simon Evans]

Dear Programmers,
I have been looking at the You tube 'Web Scraping Tutorials' of Chris Reeves. I have tried a few of his python programs in the Python27 command prompt, but altered them from accessing data using links say from the Dow Jones index, to accessing the details I would be interested in accessing from the 'Racing Post' on a daily basis. Anyhow, the code it returns is not in the example I am going to give, is not the information I am seeking, instead of returning the given odds on a horse, it only returns a [], which isn't much use. 
I would be glad if you could tell me where I am going wrong. 
Yours faithfully
Simon Evans.
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>>>import urllib
>>>import re
>>>htmlfile = urllib.urlopen("http://www.racingpost.com/horses2/cards/card.sd?

race_id=600048r_date=2014-05-08#raceTabs=sc_")
htmltext = htmlfile.read()
regex = '<strong>1<a href="http://www.racingpost.com/horses/horse_home.sd?

horse_id=758752"onclick="scorecards.send("horse_name&quot:):return Html.popup(this,

{width:695,height:800})"title="Full details about this HORSE">Lively 

Baron</a>9/4F</strong><br/>'
>>>pattern = re.compile(regex)
>>>odds=re.findall(pattern,htmltext)
>>>print odds
[]
>>>
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>>>import urllib
>>>import re
>>>htmlfile = urllib.urlopen("http://www.racingpost.com/horses2/cards/card.sd?

>>>race_id=600048r_date=2014-05-08#raceTabs=sc_")
>>>htmltext = htmlfile.read()
>>>regex = '<a></a>'
>>>pattern = re.compile(regex)
>>>odds=re.findall(pattern,htmltext)
>>>print odds
[]
>>>
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