regex pattern in python for parsing HTML title tags

It is recommended that you use Beautiful Soup or any other parser to parse HTML, but if you badly want regex the following piece of code would do the job.

The regex code:

<title.*?>(.+?)</title>

How it works:

Produces:

['Google']
['Welcome to Facebook - Log In, Sign Up or Learn More']
['reddit: the front page of the internet']

You are using a regular expression, and matching HTML with such expressions get too complicated, too fast.

Use a HTML parser instead, Python has several to choose from. I recommend you use BeautifulSoup, a popular 3rd party library.

BeautifulSoup example:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

response = urllib2.urlopen(url)
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.read(), from_encoding=response.info().getparam('charset'))
title = soup.find('title').text

Since a title tag itself doesn't contain other tags, you can get away with a regular expression here, but as soon as you try to parse nested tags, you will run into hugely complex issues.

Your specific problem can be solved by matching additional characters within the title tag, optionally:

r'<title[^>]*>([^<]+)</title>'

This matches 0 or more characters that are not the closing > bracket. The '0 or more' here lets you match both extra attributes and the plain <title> tag.