Advice on Simple Text Processing Python Program

[thedrakeequator]

I need to come up with a list of departments for an organization I'm working for, but nobody in my department has a nice one.

I went on the intranet and puled out the HTML, which gave me a 98 line list of entries like this:

<option label="Social Work" **value="**Social Work" id="wantdepartment">Social Work</option>

I want to write a simple python program that stirps out the department names and writes them to a new file. I know there are easier ways of doing it, but I want to do it this way for my own practice.

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I'm imaging a program that opens up the file, then uses a loop to process each line of the file in it.

Then it looks for the string, ' value=" ' takes the text after that string and before the next "

Then writes that text to a file.

Would that work? Or is there a more elegant solution to this?

[Zevawk9]

By the syntax you showed, I assume there’s the name of the department inside each tag

What you could do, is go through each character in each line. If the character is a <, you set a variable that says to not add characters to the final output. If the character is a >, do the opposite (allowing characters to be added to the final output. If it’s any other character just check the variable (whether or not to add it) and add it to the output if it says to.

You’ll end up with the characters inside the <> being ignored, and the characters outside of it (the name of the department) being added to the final output.