Finding a string between two strings after a certain word

Question

In the following string:

s = '>foo</a> Start >bar</a> >baz</a>'

I want to extract the first value that comes between > and </a> after start, which is bar.

The following scripts do the job separately, but I don't know how to merge them.

regexp = re.compile("Start(.*)$")
output = regexp.search(s).group(1)

output = re.search('>(.*?)</a>', s).group(1)

Use r"Start[^>]*>(.*?)</a>" or r"(?s)Start.*?>([^<]*)</a>" — Wiktor Stribiżew
– Wiktor Stribiżew, Commented Jan 5, 2021 at 0:30
This looks like HTML, is it possible to use a DOM parser instead? — Vasili Syrakis
– Vasili Syrakis, Commented Jan 5, 2021 at 0:48
Yes, it is a very long HTML, and since I couldn't get Beautifulsoup to work I thought regex is the way to go. — Walter
– Walter, Commented Jan 5, 2021 at 7:27

Wiktor Stribiżew · Accepted Answer · 2021-01-05 00:33:17Z

2

You can use

r"Start[^>]*>(.*?)</a>"
r"(?s)Start.*?>([^<]*)</a>"

See the regex demo. Details:

Start - a literal string
[^>]* - zero or more chars other than >
> - a > char
(.*?) - Group 1: any zero or more chars, as few as possible
</a> - a literal string.

See the Python demo:

import re
s = '>foo</a> Start >bar</a> >baz</a>'
regexp = re.compile(r"Start.*?>([^<]*)</a>", re.DOTALL)
m = regexp.search(s)
if m:
    print(m.group(1)) # => bar

answered Jan 5, 2021 at 0:33

Wiktor Stribiżew

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Comments

Synthaze · Accepted Answer · 2021-01-05 05:07:53Z

2

Well, Idk what you want to do with this but much simpler is:

s = '>foo</a> Start >bar</a> >baz</a>'

print (s.split("</a>")[1].split(">")[-1])

Output:

bar

edited Jan 5, 2021 at 5:07

answered Jan 5, 2021 at 0:40

Synthaze

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