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pythonbeautifulsoupfindallscraper

Python re.findall returning links with unwanted string afterwards

I have a python script using BeautifulSoup to scrape. This is my code:

re.findall('stream:\/\/.+', link)

Which is designed to find links like:

stream://987cds9c8ujru56236te2ys28u99u2s

But it also returns strings like this:

stream://987cds9c8ujru56236te2ys28u99u2s  [SD] Spanish - (9.15am)

i.e. with spaces and extra stuff which I don't want. How can I express the 

re.findall

So it only returns the link first part?

(Thanks in advance)

Solution

  • You can use a non-greedy match (adding ? to the pattern) with a word boundary character '\b':

    >>> re.findall(r'stream:\/\/.+?\b', link)
['stream://987cds9c8ujru56236te2ys28u99u2s']

    Or if you want to match only word characters you can simply use '\w+':

    >>> re.findall(r'stream:\/\/\w+', link)
['stream://987cds9c8ujru56236te2ys28u99u2s']