in a HTML-file, I've got the following occurrences:
<span class="finereader"></span>
or
<span class="finereader">a</span>
I'd like to remove all these tags. The second example shows that it's possible that there is a letter (or number, but only 1) under the tag. The letter shouldn't be removed, only <span class="finereader"> and the following </span>.
Is there any re.sub-expression which can do this?
Thanks for any help.
Another solution using BeautifulSoup:
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(open('htmlfile'))
for elem in soup.find_all('span', class_='finereader'):
elem.replace_with(elem.string or '')
print(soup.prettify())
BeautifulSoup can use several parsers, one of them lxml. Take a look to crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/#installing-a-parserprint(soup) instead of print(soup.prettify()).You might want to look at beautifulsoup instead of using regular expressions for this task.
Then you can do something like this: (used a string in this example as a html file)
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
html_doc = """
<html>
<head>
<title>Sample</title>
</head>
<body>
<span class="dummy">a</span>
<span>b</span>
</body>
</html>
"""
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc)
for span in soup.find_all('span'):
print(span.string)
# output:
# a
# b
