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I'd like to retrieve the content and href link from an HTML tag in Python.

I'm a beginner in regex and am able to retrieve the href content in this way:

urls = re.findall('<a class="title" href="(.*?)" title', page)

When trying to extract tag's content as well, I get nothing.

urls = re.findall('<a class="title" href="(.*?)" title>(.*?)</a>', page)

How to do it the right way?

Thanks in advance.

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    Doing this 'the right way' is to use a HTML parser. Commented Dec 29, 2015 at 22:27
  • Did you try using BeautifulSoup?..pypi.python.org/pypi/BeautifulSoup Commented Dec 29, 2015 at 22:29
  • @KamyarGhasemlou it's not because there, it doesn't care about tag's content. Commented Dec 29, 2015 at 22:31
  • Is using an html parser feasible for a small snippet like this one ? Commented Dec 29, 2015 at 22:31
  • do you mean the url with tag's content?(normally, <a...> is the tag, so I got a bit confused by your answer) Commented Dec 29, 2015 at 22:35

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The right way to do this is use a parser like Beautiful Soup. Trying to parse HTML with regexes is hell and you won't get very far before you hit a wall.

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That worked for me to get the URLs from heise.de:

urls = re.findall('<a .*?href="(.*?)".*?>', page)

Perhaps you can express that also simpler.

To retrieve also the Tag content:

urls = re.findall('<a .*?href="(.*?)".*?>(.*?)</a>', page)

I really do not know what this second title does in your regex, perhaps you can also give an example text which does not match. Then I can give you a better answer why your regex does not work

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