Regular expression fun. Repeated matching of a group Q

[Larry Bates]

matteosartori at gmail.com wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've spent all morning trying to work this one out:
> 
> I've got the following string:
> 
> <td>04/01/2006</td><td>Wednesday</td><td> </td><td>09:14</td><td>12:44</td><td>12:50</td><td>17:58</td><td> </td><td> </td><td> </td><td> </td><td>08:14</td>
> 
> from which I'm attempting to extract the date, and the five times from
> into a list. Only the very last time is guaranteed to be there so it
> should also work for a line like:
> 
> <td>03/01/2006</td><td>Tuesday</td><td>Annual_Holiday</td><td> </td><td> </td><td> </td><td> </td><td> </td><td> </td><td> </td><td> </td><td>08:00</td>
> 
> My Python regular expression to match that is currently:
> 
> digs = re.compile(
> r'<td>(\d{2}\/\d{2}\/\d{4})</td>.*?(?:<td>(\d+\:\d+)</td>).*$' )
> 
> which first extracts the date into group 1
> then matches the tags between the date and the first instance of a time
> into group 2
> then matches the first instance of a time into group 3
> but then group 4 grabs all the remaining string.
> 
> I've tried changing the time pattern into
> 
> (?:<td>(\d+\:\d+)</td>)+
> 
>  but that doesn't seem to mean "grab one or more cases of the previous
> regexp."
> 
> Any Python regexp gurus with a hint would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> M@
> 
This works:

import BeautifulSoup

test = '<td>04/01/2006</td>' \
       '<td>Wednesday</td>'  \
       '<td> </td>'     \
       '<td>09:14</td>'      \
       '<td>12:44</td>'      \
       '<td>12:50</td>'      \
       '<td>17:58</td>'      \
       '<td> </td>'     \
       '<td> </td>'     \
       '<td> </td>'     \
       '<td> </td>'     \
       '<td>08:14</td>'

c=BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(test)
times=[]
for i in c.childGenerator():
    if i.contents[0] == " ": continue
    times.append(i.contents[0])

date=times.pop(0)
day=times.pop(0)

print "date=", date
print "day=", day
print "times=", times

-Larry Bates