Regex xml string and print groups

Question

I have been trying to use regex to parse through a XML-style string that looks like this:

Input
"Joe Doe got a X ray <- in April blah blah lacerations blah kidney."

For each span I want to match three groups:
"blah" , class, textual content

For Example:
X ray
the matches are:
X ray, procedure, X ray

Till now I have been able to use re.search('<.+?>', xml) to find 

Inspite of using re.search('<.+?>+, xml), I have no luck in finding the other strings instead it gave X ray <- in April> which isn't the desired result either.

Related: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 — David Zemens, Sep 25 '19 at 13:52
I did research this topic well before posting this question & am well aware of the multitude of tools that would perform the required tasks much easier. However, it was posed to me to perform this task using regex which is clearly a bit of a challenge due to the limitations of regex and XML/HTML. — lagn91, Sep 25 '19 at 17:04
Cheers, glad someone was able to provide an answer before the topic was closed as a duplicate. For future advice: if you lay out what research you've done, and explain "Yes, I know I generally shouldn't do this, but I'm required to as part of a test/homework/etc." it will be less likely to be closed for any reason! — David Zemens, Sep 25 '19 at 18:09
Ah I see, thanks for the info! Will be sure to apply next time! — lagn91, Sep 25 '19 at 19:35

Robert Kearns · Accepted Answer · 2019-09-25T14:12:15.723

0

Regex is not the best for dealing with nested types like XML. But if your question is really that simple re.findall(r'<span.+?<\/span>', yourstring) will return your desired results.

edited Sep 25 '19 at 14:12

answered Sep 25 '19 at 14:00

Robert Kearns

1,631
1
8
15

thanks for the assist, this gave me ['', '', ''] so I tried `re.findall(r'', mystring)` but that returned an empty list. – lagn91 Sep 25 '19 at 14:08
Sorry diddnt realize you wanted the whole thing. Ill update the answer. – Robert Kearns Sep 25 '19 at 14:12
`re.findall(r'', mystring)` also produced an empty string, am I missing something? – lagn91 Sep 25 '19 at 14:22
You must be, it works perfectly for me. are you passing in the right string? – Robert Kearns Sep 25 '19 at 14:27
Yup, that worked. It was an environment issue on my end. Thanks! – lagn91 Sep 25 '19 at 17:17

Regex xml string and print groups

1 Answers1