Extract part of a regex match

Question

I want a regular expression to extract the title from a HTML page. Currently I have this:

title = re.search(\'\', html, re.IGNOR         


        

Answer 1

I'd think this should suffice:

#!python
import re
pattern = re.compile(r'', re.MULTILINE|re.IGNORECASE)
pattern.search(text)

... assuming that your text (HTML) is in a variable named "text."

This also assumes that there are not other HTML tags which can be legally embedded inside of an HTML TITLE tag and no way to legally embed any other < character within such a container/block.

However ...

Don't use regular expressions for HTML parsing in Python. Use an HTML parser! (Unless you're going to write a full parser, which would be a of extra work when various HTML, SGML and XML parsers are already in the standard libraries.

If your handling "real world" tag soup HTML (which is frequently non-conforming to any SGML/XML validator) then use the BeautifulSoup package. It isn't in the standard libraries (yet) but is wide recommended for this purpose.

Another option is: lxml ... which is written for properly structured (standards conformant) HTML. But it has an option to fallback to using BeautifulSoup as a parser: ElementSoup.