How to extract a part of html file

[Joe]

I'm trying to extract part of html code from a tag to a tag code begins
with <span class="boldyellow"><B><U> and ends with
TD><TD> <img src="http://whatever/some.gif"> </TD></TR></TABLE>

I was thinking of using a regular expression however I having hard time
getting the desired string. I use

htmlSource = urllib.urlopen("http://address/")
s = htmlSource.read()
htmlSource.close()

to get the html into a string, now I want to match string s from a <span
class Tag to <img src="http://whatever/some.gif"> </TD></TR></TABLE> and
store that into a new string.

Thanks

 

[Ben Finney]

I'm trying to extract part of html code from a tag to a tag

For tag soup, use BeautifulSoup:

<URL:http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/>

Available as a package in Debian, probably other decent OSen also.

 

[Mike Meyer]

For tag soup, use BeautifulSoup:
<URL:http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/>

Except he's trying to extract an apparently random part of the
file. BeautifulSoup is a wonderful thing for dealing with X/HTML
documents as structured documents, which is how you want to deal with
them most of the time.

In this case, an re works nicely:

String.find also works really well:

start = s.find('<span class="boldyellow"><B><U>') + len('<span class="boldyellow"><B><U>')
stop = s.find('TD><TD> <img src="http://whatever/some.gif"> </TD></TR></TABLE>', start)
s[start:stop] ' and ends with '

Not a lot to choose between them.

<mike

 

[Joe]

Thanks Mike that is just what I was looking for, I have looked at
beautifulsoup but it doesn't really do what I want it to do, maybe I'm
just new to python and don't exactly know what it is doing just yet.
However string find woks. Thanks

For tag soup, use BeautifulSoup:
<URL:http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/>

Except he's trying to extract an apparently random part of the file.
BeautifulSoup is a wonderful thing for dealing with X/HTML documents as
structured documents, which is how you want to deal with them most of
the time.

In this case, an re works nicely:
String.find also works really well:

start = s.find('<span class="boldyellow"><B><U>') + len('<span
class="boldyellow"><B><U>') stop = s.find('TD><TD> <img
src="http://whatever/some.gif"> </TD></TR></TABLE>', start)
s[start:stop] ' and ends with '

Not a lot to choose between them.

<mike