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how can I find all span's with a class of 'blue' that contain text in the format:
04/18/13 7:29pm
which could therefore be:
04/18/13 7:29pm
or:
Posted on 04/18/13 7:29pm
in terms of constructing the logic to do this, this is what i have got so far:
new_content = original_content.find_all('span', {'class' : 'blue'}) # using beautiful soup's find_all
pattern = re.compile('<span class=\"blue\">[data in the format 04/18/13 7:29pm]</span>') # using re
for _ in new_content:
result = re.findall(pattern, _)
print result
I've been referring to https://stackoverflow.com/a/7732827 and https://stackoverflow.com/a/12229134 to try and figure out a way to do this, but the above is all i have got so far.
edit:
to clarify the scenario, there are span's with:
<span class="blue">here is a lot of text that i don't need</span>
and
<span class="blue">this is the span i need because it contains 04/18/13 7:29pm</span>
and note i only need 04/18/13 7:29pm not the rest of the content.
edit 2:
I also tried:
pattern = re.compile('<span class="blue">.*?(\d\d/\d\d/\d\d \d\d?:\d\d\w\w)</span>')
for _ in new_content:
result = re.findall(pattern, _)
print result
and got error:
'TypeError: expected string or buffer'
421
import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
html_doc = """
<html>
<body>
<span class="blue">here is a lot of text that i don't need</span>
<span class="blue">this is the span i need because it contains 04/18/13 7:29pm</span>
<span class="blue">04/19/13 7:30pm</span>
<span class="blue">Posted on 04/20/13 10:31pm</span>
</body>
</html>
"""
# parse the html
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc)
# find a list of all span elements
spans = soup.find_all('span', {'class' : 'blue'})
# create a list of lines corresponding to element texts
lines = [span.get_text() for span in spans]
# collect the dates from the list of lines using regex matching groups
found_dates = []
for line in lines:
m = re.search(r'(\d{2}/\d{2}/\d{2} \d+:\d+[a|p]m)', line)
if m:
found_dates.append(m.group(1))
# print the dates we collected
for date in found_dates:
print(date)
output:
04/18/13 7:29pm
04/19/13 7:30pm
04/20/13 10:31pm
This is a flexible regex that you can use:
"(\d\d?/\d\d?/\d\d\d?\d?\s*\d\d?:\d\d[a|p|A|P][m|M])"
Example:
>>> import re
>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> html = """
<html>
<body>
<span class="blue">here is a lot of text that i don't need</span>
<span class="blue">this is the span i need because it contains 04/18/13 7:29pm</span>
<span class="blue">04/19/13 7:30pm</span>
<span class="blue">04/18/13 7:29pm</span>
<span class="blue">Posted on 15/18/2013 10:00AM</span>
<span class="blue">Posted on 04/20/13 10:31pm</span>
<span class="blue">Posted on 4/1/2013 17:09aM</span>
</body>
</html>
"""
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
>>> lines = [i.get_text() for i in soup.find_all('span', {'class' : 'blue'})]
>>> ok = [m.group(1)
for line in lines
for m in (re.search(r'(\d\d?/\d\d?/\d\d\d?\d?\s*\d\d?:\d\d[a|p|A|P][m|M])', line),)
if m]
>>> ok
[u'04/18/13 7:29pm', u'04/19/13 7:30pm', u'04/18/13 7:29pm', u'15/18/2013 10:00AM', u'04/20/13 10:31pm', u'4/1/2013 17:09aM']
>>> for i in ok:
print i
04/18/13 7:29pm
04/19/13 7:30pm
04/18/13 7:29pm
15/18/2013 10:00AM
04/20/13 10:31pm
4/1/2013 17:09aM
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