DiscussWorldIssues - Socio-Economic Religion and Political Uncensored Debate - View Single Post - Anyone good at regular expressions? (computing)

**Wmshyrga** · 05-02-2007, 07:32 AM

I have posted this at a specialist forum but activity is rather slow, and was hoping maybe some of you computer scientists might be able to help me with it.

I have spent a long time today trying to build a regular expression for screen scraping a website. The (example) text it will be scanning is:

" Glouster Museums: Abbey Home Museum - Kirkhall Road, Kirkhall, Glouster, GL4 5BY, England
"

What I am trying to get from that is ONLY the museum name, and the address, with none of the html. So I would like:

Abbey Home Museum - Kirkhall Road, Kirkhall, Glouster, GL4 5BY

My regEx at the moment is -

[\w \\=\"]*\-[\w, ]*LS[\d ]*[\w, ]*land

Which returns -

Abbey Home Museum<span class=text ALIGN="justify"> - Kirkhall Road, Kirkhall, Glouster, GL4 5BY, England

This is close, but I need to omit the html tags, and ideally get rid of the trailing 'England' too. The latter is not so essential however, just getting rid of the HTML will do.

I am using this program http://www.webscrape.com/, which you run from the command line. I know it might be a bit of a long shot but does anyone have an idea of what I can try? Thanks.

05-02-2007, 07:32 AM	#1
Wmshyrga Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 494 Senior Member	Anyone good at regular expressions? (computing) I have posted this at a specialist forum but activity is rather slow, and was hoping maybe some of you computer scientists might be able to help me with it. I have spent a long time today trying to build a regular expression for screen scraping a website. The (example) text it will be scanning is: " Glouster Museums: Abbey Home Museum - Kirkhall Road, Kirkhall, Glouster, GL4 5BY, England " What I am trying to get from that is ONLY the museum name, and the address, with none of the html. So I would like: Abbey Home Museum - Kirkhall Road, Kirkhall, Glouster, GL4 5BY My regEx at the moment is - [\w \\=\"]\-[\w, ]LS[\d ][\w, ]land Which returns - Abbey Home Museum<span class=text ALIGN="justify"> - Kirkhall Road, Kirkhall, Glouster, GL4 5BY, England This is close, but I need to omit the html tags, and ideally get rid of the trailing 'England' too. The latter is not so essential however, just getting rid of the HTML will do. I am using this program http://www.webscrape.com/, which you run from the command line. I know it might be a bit of a long shot but does anyone have an idea of what I can try? Thanks.
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