How do you find multiple, identical strings and list them?

[aikoiha]

I'm extremely new, so bear with me.

I have a webpage in xml displaying Earthquake information (Magnitude, place and etc.). I need to list each place and magnitude, which is located between <title> tags. The str.find() only works for one thing, but I need to list them all. Also, the page has an irrelevant title in the beginning and I need to start my search after that. This is what I have:

import urllib.request

def printEarthquakeTitle(requestedURL):
    page = urllib.request.urlopen(requestedURL)
    text = page.read().decode("utf8")
    start = text.find("<title>") + 7
    end = text.find("</title")
    title = str(text[start:end])
    return title

title = printEarthquakeTitle("http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/catalogs/7day-M2.5.xml")
print(title)

This only prints out that first irrelevant title between the title tags. I need to print the one after that.

And then I need to list all the titles after that one.

I know I need a while/loop, but I don't know how to skip the first irrelevant title.

This is basically the website:

<title>irreleva nt title</title>

<title>this is the title i need</title>

<title>then I need to list these</title>
<title>then I need to list these</title>
<title>then I need to list these</title>
<title>then I need to list these</title>

I hope this makes sense.

[bvdet]

You can advance through the text using find() by supplying a starting index as in:

>>> s = "12345678901234567xxx890"
>>> i = s.find('7')
>>> i
6
>>> s[s.find('7', i+1):]
'7xxx890'
>>>

Ideally you would parse the XML with an XML parser such as xml.dom.minidom . Sample code:

from xml.dom import minidom

xmlStr = '''<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<data>
    <title>irrelevant title</title>
    <title>this is the title i need</title>
    <title>then I need to list these</title>
    <title>then I need to list these</title>
    <title>then I need to list these</title>
    <title>then I need to list these</title>
</data>'''

def getTextFromElem(parents):
    '''Return a list of text found in the child nodes of a list
    of parent nodes, discarding whitespace.'''
    textList = []
    for parent in parents:
        for n in parent.childNodes:
            # TEXT_NODE - 3
            if n.nodeType == 3 and n.nodeValue.strip():
                textList.append(str(n.nodeValue.strip()))
    return textList

docXML = minidom.parseString(xmlStr)
nodeList = docXML.getElementsByTagName("title")
textList = getTextFromElem(nodeList)
for s in textList:
    print s

Output:

>>> irrelevant title
this is the title i need
then I need to list these
then I need to list these
then I need to list these
then I need to list these

To exclude the first item:

textList[1:]

Sample code using find():

def idx_list(seq, item):
    idxList = []
    idx = -1
    while True:
        idx = seq.find(item, idx+1)
        if idx == -1:
            break
        else:
            idxList.append(idx)
    return idxList

def getTextFromDoc(doc, tag):
    startXs = idx_list(doc, "<%s>" % tag)
    endXs = idx_list(doc, "</%s>" % tag)
    try:
        assert len(startXs) == len(endXs)
    except AssertionError:
        print "Unbalanced tags"
        return []
    return [doc[i+len("<%s>" % tag):j] for i, j in zip(startXs, endXs)]

print getTextFromDoc(xmlStr, 'title')

[aikoiha]

Thanks!

It took a bit going through it all, but with your help, I figured it out. Thanks!