Counterpart to PHP’s preg_match in Python

Question

I am planning to move one of my scrapers to Python. I am comfortable using preg_match and preg_match_all in PHP. I am not finding a suitable function in Python similar to preg_match. Could anyone please help me in doing so?

For example, if I want to get the content between <a class="title" and </a>, I use the following function in PHP:

preg_match_all('/a class="title"(.*?)<\/a>/si',$input,$output);

Whereas in Python I am not able to figure out a similar function.

Answer 1

You looking for python's re module.

Take a look at re.findall and re.search.

And as you have mentioned you are trying to parse html use html parsers for that. There are a couple of option available in python like lxml or BeautifulSoup.

Take a look at this Why you should not parse html with regex

Answer 2

I think you need somthing like that:

output = re.search('a class="title"(.*?)<\/a>', input, flags=re.IGNORECASE)
    if output is not None:
        output = output.group(0)
        print(output)

you can add (?s) at the start of regex to enable multiline mode:

output = re.search('(?s)a class="title"(.*?)<\/a>', input, flags=re.IGNORECASE)
    if output is not None:
        output = output.group(0)
        print(output)