Retrieving specific data from response data through python

Question

I am receiving data from a web service and its replying me data in html form.The response data i am getting is this dropdown:

<span>

        <select name="country" id="country" class="text " style="width:170px;">
                        <option value="">-Select country-</option>
                                <option value="Russia" >Russia</option>
                                <option value="America" >America</option>
                                <option value="Spain" >Spain</option>
                                <option value="France" >France</option>
                                <option value="X - 15" >X - 15</option>


        </select>
</span>

I need to further process on this data and get option values in python list.How can i select all country names and collect them into a python list?

If you're getting an html response, you don't need regexps but an xml/html parser. — Rik Poggi
– Rik Poggi, Commented Jan 26, 2012 at 8:17
If you plan to use regex for parsing HTML, please read this: stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/… — user647772
– user647772, Commented Jan 26, 2012 at 8:33

mvanveen · Accepted Answer · 2012-01-28 23:34:51Z

3

Check out beautiful soup.

In this case, you could do the following assuming you had your html block in the html var as a string:

 >>> import BeautifulSoup as bs
 >>>  
 >>>  html = bs.BeautifulSoup(html)
 >>>  html.findAll('option')

For even more syntactic sugar, check out soupselect.

edited Jan 28, 2012 at 23:34

answered Jan 26, 2012 at 8:14

mvanveen

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3 Comments

user1170793 Over a year ago

Thanks mvanveen.......i will use beautifulSoup when i have to parse more HTML data.

user1170793 Over a year ago

html.findAll('option') instead of a.findAll('option')

mvanveen Over a year ago

Nice catch, sorry about that! Edited.

Nitin Kumar · Accepted Answer · 2012-01-26 08:22:12Z

0

import re

pattern = r"<option value=\"(.*)\" >"
val=re.findall(pattern,htmlCode)

val will contain a list of all values

Based on your example html code, the above regex findall should do the job for you, however if you are doing a lot of extensive html code parsing then usually regex are not an good option. But for a simple case like yours this is the best option.

answered Jan 26, 2012 at 8:22

Nitin Kumar

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