Parsing Xml In Python With Regex
I'm trying to use regex to parse an XML file (in my case this seems the simplest way). For example a line might be: line='PLAINSBORO, NJ 08536-1906
Solution 1:
You normally don't want to use re.match. Quoting from the docs:
If you want to locate a match anywhere in string, use search() instead (see also search() vs. match()).
Note:
>>>print re.match('>.*<', line)
None
>>>print re.search('>.*<', line)
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x10f666238>
>>>print re.search('>.*<', line).group(0)
>PLAINSBORO, NJ 08536-1906<
Also, why parse XML with regex when you can use something like BeautifulSoup :).
>>>from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as BS>>>line='<City_State>PLAINSBORO, NJ 08536-1906</City_State>'>>>soup = BS(line)>>>print soup.find('city_state').text
PLAINSBORO, NJ 08536-1906
Solution 2:
Please, just use an XML parser like ElementTree
>>>from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET>>>line='<City_State>PLAINSBORO, NJ 08536-1906</City_State>'>>>ET.fromstring(line).text
'PLAINSBORO, NJ 08536-1906'
Solution 3:
re.match returns a match only if the pattern matches the entire string. To find substrings matching the pattern, use re.search.
And yes, this is a simple way to parse XML, but I would highly encourage you to use a library specifically designed for the task.
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