Extract part of a regex match

user_105066 0
Viewed 293418

I want a regular expression to extract the title from a HTML page. Currently I have this:

title = re.search('<title>.*</title>', html, re.IGNORECASE).group()
if title:
    title = title.replace('<title>', '').replace('</title>', '')

Is there a regular expression to extract just the contents of <title> so I don't have to remove the tags?

html-content-extraction html python regex
11 Answers

Note that starting in Python 3.8, and the introduction of assignment expressions (PEP 572) (:= operator), it's possible to improve a bit on Krzysztof Krasoń's solution by capturing the match result directly within the if condition as a variable and re-use it in the condition's body:

# pattern = '<title>(.*)</title>'
# text = '<title>hello</title>'
if match := re.search(pattern, text, re.IGNORECASE):
  title = match.group(1)
# hello
user_92971440

The currently top-voted answer by Krzysztof Krasoń fails with <title>a</title><title>b</title>. Also, it ignores title tags crossing line boundaries, e.g., for line-length reasons. Finally, it fails with <title >a</title> (which is valid HTML: White space inside XML/HTML tags).

I therefore propose the following improvement:

import re

def search_title(html):
    m = re.search(r"<title\s*>(.*?)</title\s*>", html, re.IGNORECASE | re.DOTALL)
    return m.group(1) if m else None

Test cases:

print(search_title("<title   >with spaces in tags</title >"))
print(search_title("<title\n>with newline in tags</title\n>"))
print(search_title("<title>first of two titles</title><title>second title</title>"))
print(search_title("<title>with newline\n in title</title\n>"))

Output:

with spaces in tags
with newline in tags
first of two titles
with newline
  in title

Ultimately, I go along with others recommending an HTML parser - not only, but also to handle non-standard use of HTML tags.

user_8807830

I needed something to match package-0.0.1 (name, version) but want to reject an invalid version such as 0.0.010.

See regex101 example.

import re

RE_IDENTIFIER = re.compile(r'^([a-z]+)-((?:(?:0|[1-9](?:[0-9]+)?)\.){2}(?:0|[1-9](?:[0-9]+)?))$')

example = 'hello-0.0.1'

if match := RE_IDENTIFIER.search(example):
    name, version = match.groups()
    print(f'Name:     {name}')
    print(f'Version:  {version}')
else:
    raise ValueError(f'Invalid identifier {example}')

Output:

Name:     hello
Version:  0.0.1
user_8269830

Is there a particular reason why no one suggested using lookahead and lookbehind? I got here trying to do the exact same thing and (?<=<title>).+(?=<\/title>) works great. It will only match whats between parentheses so you don't have to do the whole group thing.

user_127336290
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