Extracting data between two tags in HTML file

Question

I\'ve got a HUUUGE HTML file here saved on my system, which contains data from a product catalogue. The data is structured such that for each product record the name is bet

Answer 1

There are two ways of solving this sort of problem: string manipulation with regexes (as suggested by gnovice) or parsing the file (or a mix of the two). Parsing is often best if your file is very well structured; regexes win for messy files.

Here's the parsing solution.

Start by downloading xmliotools, and calling xml_read on your file. Your example isn't completely reproducible, so here are two different versions of the data.

Save this to test1.xml:

'hat'
'1829493'
'cyan'
'dress'
'18'
'dark purple'

Save this to test2.xml.

'hat'
'1829493'
'cyan'


'dress'
'18'
'dark purple'

Now compare

x1 = xml_read('test1.xml')
x2 = xml_read('test2.xml')