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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