How can I extract substrings between two characters in python?-CodePudding

I have a nasty string that I converted from HTML code that looks like this:

<p><topic url="car-colours">Toyota Camry</topic> has <a href="/colours/dark-red">Dark Red</a><span> (2020)</span>, <a href="/colours/pearl-white">Pearl White</a><span> (2016 - 2017)

I want to extract the names of the colours from this string and put them in a list. I was thinking maybe I extract all substrings between the ">" and the "<" character as all colours are wrapped in it but I don't know how.

My goal is to have a list that will store all colours for the toyota camry like: toyota_camry_colours = ["Dark Red", "Pearl White"]

Any ideas how I can do this? In bash I would use like grep or awk and stuff but don't know for python.

CodePudding user response：

The BeautifulSoup module was designed to parse HTML.

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup 

str = """\
<p><topic url="car-colours">Toyota Camry</topic> has <a href="/colours/dark-red">Dark Red</a><span> (2020)</span>, <a href="/colours/pearl-white">Pearl White</a><span> (2016 - 2017)"""

soup = BeautifulSoup(str, 'html.parser')
for link in soup.find_all('a'):
    print( link.text )

Output:

Dark Red
Pearl White

CodePudding user response：

A simple regex would help it /colours/([\w-] )

import re

txt = '<p><topic url="car-colours">Toyota Camry</topic> has <a href="/colours/dark-red">Dark Red</a><span>' \
      ' (2020)</span>, <a href="/colours/pearl-white">Pearl White</a><span> (2016 - 2017)'
colors = re.findall(r"/colours/([\w-] )", txt)
print(colors)  # ['dark-red', 'pearl-white']

colors = [" ".join(word.capitalize() for word in color.split("-")) for color in colors]
print(colors)  # ['Dark Red', 'Pearl White']