Extract part of a regex match

Question

I want a regular expression to extract the title from a HTML page. Currently I have this:

title = re.search(\'\', html, re.IGNOR         


        

Answer 1

May I recommend you to Beautiful Soup. Soup is a very good lib to parse all of your html document.

soup = BeatifulSoup(html_doc)
titleName = soup.title.name

Answer 2

The currently top-voted answer by Krzysztof Krasoń fails with <title>a</title><title>b</title>. Also, it ignores title tags crossing line boundaries, e.g., for line-length reasons. Finally, it fails with <title >a</title> (which is valid HTML: White space inside XML/HTML tags).

I therefore propose the following improvement:

import re

def search_title(html):
    m = re.search(r"<title\s*>(.*?)</title\s*>", html, re.IGNORECASE | re.DOTALL)
    return m.group(1) if m else None

Test cases:

print(search_title("<title   >with spaces in tags</title >"))
print(search_title("<title\n>with newline in tags</title\n>"))
print(search_title("<title>first of two titles</title><title>second title</title>"))
print(search_title("<title>with newline\n in title</title\n>"))

Output:

with spaces in tags
with newline in tags
first of two titles
with newline
  in title

Ultimately, I go along with others recommending an HTML parser - not only, but also to handle non-standard use of HTML tags.

Answer 3

Try using capturing groups:

title = re.search('<title>(.*)</title>', html, re.IGNORECASE).group(1)