Pfthb

I have an XML document where I wish to extract certain text contained in specific tags such as-

<title>Four-minute warning</title>
<categories>
<category>Nuclear warfare</category>
<category>Cold War</category>
<category>Cold War military history of the United Kingdom</category>
<category>disaster preparedness in the United Kingdom</category>
<category>History of the United Kingdom</category>
</categories>

<bdy>
some text
</bdy>

In this toy example, if I want to extract all the text contained in tags by using the following Regular Expression code in Python 3-

# Python 3 code using RE-
file = open("some_xml_file.xml", "r")
xml_doc = file.read()
file.close()

title_text = re.findall(r'<title>.+</title>', xml_doc)

if title_text:
 print("nMatches found!n")
 for title in title_text:
 print(title)
else:
 print("nNo matches found!nn")

It gives me the text within the XML tags ALONG with the tags. An example of a single output would be-

<title>Four-minute warning</title>

My question is, how should I frame the pattern within the re.findall() or re.search() methods so that and tags are skipped and all I get is the text between them.

Thanks for your help!

Just use a capture group in your regex (re.findall() takes care of the rest in this case). For example:

import re

s = '<title>Four-minute warning</title>'

title_text = re.findall(r'<title>(.+)</title>', s)

print(title_text[0])
# OUTPUT
# Four-minute warning