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

This is a flexible regex that you can use:

"(\d\d?/\d\d?/\d\d\d?\d?\s*\d\d?:\d\d[a|p|A|P][m|M])"

Example:

>>> import re
>>> from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
>>> html = """


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
04/18/13 7:29pm
Posted on 15/18/2013 10:00AM
Posted on 04/20/13 10:31pm
Posted on 4/1/2013 17:09aM


"""
>>> soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
>>> lines = [i.get_text() for i in soup.find_all('span', {'class' : 'blue'})]
>>> ok = [m.group(1)
      for line in lines
        for m in (re.search(r'(\d\d?/\d\d?/\d\d\d?\d?\s*\d\d?:\d\d[a|p|A|P][m|M])', line),)
          if m]
>>> ok
[u'04/18/13 7:29pm', u'04/19/13 7:30pm', u'04/18/13 7:29pm', u'15/18/2013 10:00AM', u'04/20/13 10:31pm', u'4/1/2013 17:09aM']
>>> for i in ok:
    print i

04/18/13 7:29pm
04/19/13 7:30pm
04/18/13 7:29pm
15/18/2013 10:00AM
04/20/13 10:31pm
4/1/2013 17:09aM