Regular expression to structure HTML

[Brian D]

The other thought I had was that I may not be properly trapping the
end of the first <tr> row, and the beginning of the next <tr> row.


On Oct 2, 8:38 am, John <jmg3... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Oct 2, 1:10 am, "504cr... at gmail.com" <504cr... at 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