Finding multiple regex in one string

Question

Suppose we have this:

html = 'http://example.com'
regex = '<(\d{0,2})>'
regex1 = '<span>(.+?)</span>' 
p = re.compile(regex)
p1 = re.compile(regex1)

Is it possible to re.findall both p and p1 within one findall statement?

Couldn't you just use regex = '(<(\d{0,2})>|<span>(.+?)</span>)' ? — Steve Chambers
– Steve Chambers, Commented Mar 11, 2013 at 14:15
Not sure this would work. I need to find both (there are always both present) and when python approaches the first one and evaluates to True then will skip the 2nd statement i guess. — nutship
– nutship, Commented Mar 11, 2013 at 14:20
Oh, I see... In that case I'm not sure as Python documentation says findall returns all non-overlapping matches. There may be a way but I don't know of one - if not, could you consider merging the two result arrays? — Steve Chambers
– Steve Chambers, Commented Mar 11, 2013 at 14:32

Martijn Pieters · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-11 14:16:29Z

1

First of all: You generally want to avoid using regular expressions to parse HTML. You really want to use a HTML parser instead. BeautifulSoup lets you search for elements with a certain text contained (even using regular expressions for matching specific aspects found in the HTML)

You can combine regular expressions using the | pipe, in a group:

p_or_p1 = re.compile('(?:{}|{})'.format(p, p1))

answered Mar 11, 2013 at 14:16

Martijn Pieters

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2 Comments

nutship Over a year ago

Thanks for the HTML parser advice. I'll surely try to learn this but until I do I'm kinda stuck with the regex at least for the current project. btw. can you recommand any worthwhile url to the HTML parser stuff except for the official documentation?

Martijn Pieters Over a year ago

I can't recommend any BeautifulSoup tutorials because I never read one myself. :-) The documentation is pretty straightforward though; you can always look through the questions here on SO (I answered a fair number of BS questions).

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