How to remove HTML comments using Regex in Python

Question

I want to remove HTML comments from an html text

heading
  some text <-- con --> more text 

        

Answer 1

re.sub("(?s)<!--.+?-->", "", s)

or

re.sub("<!--.+?-->", "", s, flags=re.DOTALL)

Answer 2

You could try this regex <![^<]*>

Answer 3

Don't use regex. Use an XML parser instead, the one in the standard library is more than sufficient.

from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET
html = ET.parse("comments.html")
ET.dump(html) # Dumps to stdout
ET.write("no-comments.html", method="html") # Write to a file

Answer 4

Finally came up with this option:

re.sub("(<!--.*?-->)", "", t)

Adding the ? makes the search non-greedy and does not combine multiple comment tags.

Answer 5

html = re.sub(r"<!--(.|\s|\n)*?-->", "", html)

re.sub basically find the matching instance and replace with the second arguments. For this case, <!--(.|\s|\n)*?--> matches anything start with <!-- and end with -->. The dot and ? means anything, and the \s and \n add the cases of muti line comment.

Answer 6

You shouldn't ignore Carriage return.

re.sub("(<!--.*?-->)", "", s, flags=re.DOTALL)