webspider, regexp not working, why?

[notnorwegian]

url = re.compile(r"^((ht|f)tp(s?)\:\/\/|~/|/)?([\w]+:\w+@)?([a-zA-Z]
{1}
([\w\-]+\.)+
([\w]{2,5}))(:[\d]{1,5})?((/?\w+/)+|/?)(\w+\.[\w]{3,4})?((\?\w+=\w+)?
(&
\w+=\w+)*)?")

why isnt this url catching something like:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Python
Screencasts"
href="http://www.showmedo.com/latestVideoFeed/rss2.0?
tag=python" />

site = urllib.urlopen("http://www.python.org")
for row in site:
obj = url.search(row)
if obj != None:
print "url: ", obj.group()

i know it works because it can catch
www.hello.com in a txt-file and i can catch emails of websites with
another regexp.

search and match yields the same results.

but when you put something like href= in front of it it doesnt work.

i see now that it has to match the beginning of the row or something,
because:
hi www.google.com
doesnt match but
www.google.com hi
matches.
i though a regexp would search a row/file and when it finds an
occurence report it, so a regexp of "lo" would match in lopez.

[Reedick, Andrew]

-----Original Message-----
From: py********************************@python.org [mailto:python-
li*************************@python.org] On Behalf Of
no**********@yahoo.se
Sent: Friday, May 23, 2008 12:43 PM
To: py*********@python.org
Subject: webspider, regexp not working, why?

url = re.compile(r"^((ht|f)tp(s?)\:\/\/|~/|/)?([\w]+:\w+@)?([a-zA-Z]

search and match yields the same results.

but when you put something like href= in front of it it doesnt work.

a) '^' matches at the beginning of a line. So if 'href=' is at the
beginning of the line...

b) Regexes are hard enough to read as is. (http|ftp|https) is more
readable than ((ht|f)tp(s?).

c) If you're going to parse html/xml then bite the bullet and learn one
of the libraries specifically designed to parse html/xml. Many other
regex gurus have learned this lesson. Myself included. =)

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[alex23]

On May 24, 3:26 am, "Reedick, Andrew" <[e-mail]:

c) If you're going to parse html/xml then bite the bullet and learn one
of the libraries specifically designed to parse html/xml. Many other
regex gurus have learned this lesson. Myself included. =)

Agreed. The BeautifulSoup approach is particularly nice (although not
part of stdlib):

>>import urllib
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
html = urllib.urlopen('http://www.python.org/').read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
links = [link['href'] for link in soup('link')]
links[0]

u'http://www.python.org/channews.rdf'

- alex23