How can I extract the content (how are you) from the string:
<string xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/">how are you</string>.
Can I use regex for the purpose? if possible whats suitable regex for it.
Note: I dont want to use split function for extract the result. Also can you suggest some links to learn regex for a beginner.
I am using python2.7.2
You could use a regular expression for this (as Joey demonstrates).
However if your XML document is any bigger than this one-liner you could not since XML is not a regular language.
>>> from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
>>> xml_as_str = '<string xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/">how are you</string>. '
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(xml_as_str)
>>> print soup.text
how are you.
Or...
>>> for string_tag in soup.findAll('string'):
... print string_tag.text
...
how are you
string element doesn't really imply arbitrary nesting, so this might be perfectly feasible). Also, isn't BeautifulSoup for parsing malformed HTML? Better to use an actual XML parser, I guess.
Try with following regex:
/<[^>]*>(.*?)</
(?<=<string xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/">)[^<]+(?=</string>)
would match what you want, as a trivial example.
(?<=<)[^<]+
would, too. It all depends a bit on how your input is formatted exactly.
This will match a generic HTML tag (Replace "string" with the tag you want to match):
/<string[^<]*>(.*?)<\/string>/i
(i=case insensitive)
