Regular expression to match closing HTML tags

Question

I\'m working on a small Python script to clean up HTML documents. It works by accepting a list of tags to KEEP and then parsing through the HTML code trashing tags that are

Answer 1

You may also consider using the html parser that is built into python (Documentation for Python 2 and Python 3)

This will help you home in on the specific area of the HTML Document you would like to work on - and use regular expressions on it.

Answer 2

1. Read:

   • RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags
   • Can you provide some examples of why it is hard to parse XML and HTML with a regex?

2. Repent.

3. Use a real HTML parser, like BeautifulSoup.

Answer 3

Don't use regex to parse HTML. It will only give you headaches.

Use an XML parser instead. Try BeautifulSoup or lxml.

Answer 4

<TAG\b[^>]*>(.*?)</TAG> 

Matches the opening and closing pair of a specific HTML tag.

<([A-Z][A-Z0-9]*)\b[^>]*>(.*?)</\1>

Will match the opening and closing pair of any HTML tag.

See here.