How to find spans with a specific class containing specific text using beautiful soup and re?

Question

how can I find all span\'s with a class of \'blue\' that contain text in the format:

04/18/13 7:29pm

which could therefore be:

Answer 1

import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html_doc = """


here is a lot of text that i don't need
this is the span i need because it contains 04/18/13 7:29pm
04/19/13 7:30pm
Posted on 04/20/13 10:31pm


"""

# parse the html
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc)

# find a list of all span elements
spans = soup.find_all('span', {'class' : 'blue'})

# create a list of lines corresponding to element texts
lines = [span.get_text() for span in spans]

# collect the dates from the list of lines using regex matching groups
found_dates = []
for line in lines:
    m = re.search(r'(\d{2}/\d{2}/\d{2} \d+:\d+[a|p]m)', line)
    if m:
        found_dates.append(m.group(1))

# print the dates we collected
for date in found_dates:
    print(date)

---

output:

04/18/13 7:29pm
04/19/13 7:30pm
04/20/13 10:31pm