how do I extract data from html file ? - web scraping

[masterinex]

Hi guys , Im a little unfamiliar with Python . Hope you can take a look at this:

Im trying to extract the number 7.2 from the html string below using python:

'''<a href="/ratings_explained">weighted average</a> vote of <a href="/List?ratings=7">7.2</a> / 10</p><p>'''

I thought this would be code to do this .But how come this doesnt work ?

averageget = re.compile('<a href="/List?ratings=7">(.*?)</a>')
average = averageget.findall(htmlr)

Could it be that there some special structures in the html file again which I missed out ?

[bvdet]

Please use code tags when posting code.

The question mark (?) is a special character sequence recognized in regular expression patterns. To use the literal character, precede the character with a backslash.

averageget = re.compile('<a href="/List\?ratings=7">(.*?)</a>')