Python Regular Expression example
import re
m = re.search("Your number is <b>(\d+)</b>",
"xxx Your number is <b>123</b> fdjsk")
if m:
print m.groups()[0]
Given s = "Your number is <b>123</b>"
then:
import re
m = re.search(r"\d+", s)
will work and give you
m.group()
'123'
The regular expression looks for 1 or more consecutive digits in your string.
Note that in this specific case we knew that there would be a numeric sequence, otherwise you would have to test the return value of re.search()
to make sure that m
contained a valid reference, otherwise m.group()
would result in a AttributeError:
exception.
Of course if you are going to process a lot of HTML you want to take a serious look at BeautifulSoup - it's meant for that and much more. The whole idea with BeautifulSoup is to avoid "manual" parsing using string ops or regular expressions.
import re
x = 'Your number is <b>123</b>'
re.search('(?<=Your number is )<b>(\d+)</b>',x).group(0)
this searches for the number that follows the 'Your number is' string