pythonregexreluctant-quantifiers

Regex quantifiers

I'm new to regex and this is stumping me.

In the following example, I want to extract facebook.com/pages/Dr-Morris-Westfried-Dermatologist/176363502456825?id=176363502456825&sk=info. I've read up on lazy quantifiers and lookbehinds but I still can't piece together the right regex. I'd expect facebook.com\/.*?sk=info to work but it captures too much. Can you guys help? 

<i class="mrs fbProfileBylineIcon img sp_2p7iu7 sx_96df30"></i></span><span class="fbProfileBylineLabel"><span itemprop="address" itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Dr-Morris-Westfried-Dermatologist/176363502456825?sk=page_map" target="_self">7508 15th Avenue, Brooklyn, New York 11228</a></span></span></span><span class="fbProfileBylineFragment"><span class="fbProfileBylineIconContainer"><i class="mrs fbProfileBylineIcon img sp_2p7iu7 sx_9f18df"></i></span><span class="fbProfileBylineLabel"><span itemprop="telephone">(718) 837-9004</span></span></span></div></div></div><a class="title" href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Dr-Morris-Westfried-Dermatologist/176363502456825?id=176363502456825&amp;sk=info" aria-label="About Dr. Morris Westfried - Dermatologist">
Solution

  • Why your pattern doesn't work:

    You pattern doesn't work because the regex engine try your pattern from left to right in the string.

    When the regex engine meets the first facebook.com\/ in the string, and since you use .*? after, the regex engine will add to the (possible) match result all the characters (including " or > or spaces) until it finds sk=info (since . can match any characters except newlines).

    This is the reason why fejese suggests to replace the dot with [^"] or aliteralmind suggests to replace it with [^>] to make the pattern fail at this position in the string (the first).

    Using an html parser is the easiest way if you want to deal with html. However, for a ponctual match or search/replace, note that if an html parser provide security, simplicity, it has a cost in term of performance since you need to load the whole tree of your document for a single task.