Master Regex Extraction in Python Web Scraping: From Numbers to Strings

Introduction

Hello, I am PiPi. In a Python community a member asked about a web‑scraping problem, and a teacher provided the following code:

url = "http://zw.hainan.gov.cn/wssc/ec/jlyhnkj.html"
resp = requests.get(url)
text = resp.text
parse = etree.HTML(text)
price = parse.xpath("//div[@class='productlist']/ul/li/div[4]/text()")
price = [i.strip() for i in price if i.strip()]
print(price)

Followers raised a question about handling the extracted data with regular expressions, which is shared below.

Implementation

An example string like “身高180.3cm” needs the numeric part 180.3. The basic regex for a floating‑point number is:

\d+\.\d+

A more robust solution that captures both floats and integers was later optimized:

d = ["身高180.3cm", "身高180.3", "身高180.3厘米", "higt180.3cm", "higt180.3厘米", "身高180.3cm", "higt180cm"]
for s in d:
    r = re.findall(r'\d+\.\d+|\d+', s)
    print(r)

With this slight modification the pattern works for any numeric format.

Conclusion

The article presented a Python web‑crawling issue, demonstrated how to clean the scraped data with regular expressions, and provided a reusable solution for extracting numeric values from mixed strings, helping readers solve similar problems efficiently.