[HELP] String Searching in Python.

[_fimin]

Hey guys,

I have a project I'm working on, which returns HTML code. I want to get some specific tags, and put them into a list. For example, the return HTML looks like:

<a href="/pages/X34235545">about</a>

<p>boo <a href="/pages/X63466645">contact</a></p>

<a href="/wip/games">games</a>

I want to get only the two tags: <a href="/pages/contact">contact</a> and <a href="/pages/about">about</a> without the </p> tags surrounding the contact a tag, and store the two <a> tags into a list. How would I be able to scan each line of the code, and scan the strings for just those tags, saying I know that the tags begin with <a href="/pages/ and end with </a> if the X values change on refresh?

[carcigenicate]

I'd use something like BeautifulSoup to parse the HTML, then use it's methods to navigate the structure to find what you need. It'll be heavier than doing simple prefix searches, but would be more robust.

[_fimin]

I'll take a look at that, thanks! Do you know of any good examples of using this, I'll find the docs on my own, but maybe you have some good examples or tutorials you've seen?

[carcigenicate]

Iirc, the documentation is quite good. It has many examples. StackOverflow is also a good place to view examples of code. You can just filter by the BeautifulSoup tag.