Python remove certain elements in source

Question

I have some source where I am trying to remove some tags, I do know that using regular expression for removing tags and such is not advised but figured this would be the easiest route to take.

What I need to do is remove all img and a tags along with the contents of the a tags that are only inside a p tag but I am unsure how to do this using regular expression.

For example when it comes across:

<p><img src="center.jpg"><a href="?center">center</a>TEXT<img src="right.jpg"><a href="?rightspan">right</a> MORE TEXT<img src="another.jpg"></p>

The output should be the following where all a tags and content and img tags are removed.

<p>TEXT MORE TEXT</p>

The problem is like I stated i'm not sure how to do this, and my regular expression removes all of the a and img tags in the source, not just the ones inside of a p tag.

re.sub(r'<(img|a).*?>|</a>', '', text)

"but figured this would be the easiest route to take" - well, as you can see it's not that easy. Why not try other routes then? :) — BartoszKP, Dec 30 '13 at 16:30
Here is an easier route to take [Remove all tags](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13058284/remove-all-a-tags). — Steven Rumbalski, Dec 30 '13 at 16:31
I'll be the first to say [this](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454), and recommend the wonderful tools of [the standard library](http://docs.python.org/3/library/html.parser.html) (or Beautiful Soup). — rlms, Dec 30 '13 at 16:33
Thanks for the all the links and references. I know now not to use regular expression as it is much easier to use a parser. — J. Stedam, Dec 30 '13 at 23:39

hwnd · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-30T16:45:10.510

Your regular expression indeed will remove all tags without using some type of assertion. Although you possibly could use regular expression to perform this, I do advise not going this route for many reasons.

You could simply use BeautifulSoup to pass a list of what to remove.

>>> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
>>> html = '<p><img src="center.jpg"><a href="?center">center</a>TEXT<img src="right.jpg"><a href="?rightspan">right</a> MORE TEXT<img src="another.jpg"></p>'
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
>>> for m in soup.findAll(['a', 'img']):
...   if m.parent.name == 'p':
...      m.replaceWith('')

>>> print soup

<p>TEXT MORE TEXT</p>

Note: This will replace all <a>, </a> and <img> elements (including content) that are inside of a <p> element leaving the rest untouched. If you have BS4, use find_all() and replace_with()

Noticing your good regex and looking for things to learn in some of your old posts... And +1'ing this for an instructive solution that has nothing to do with regex! — zx81, May 05 '14 at 23:42
@zx81 Go here [http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/52067/foo](http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/52067/foo) — hwnd, May 05 '14 at 23:46

Python remove certain elements in source

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