python findall finds only the last occurrence

Question

I'm trying to extract some data from webpage using Python 2.7.5.

code:

p = re.compile(r'.*<section\s*id="(.+)">(.+)</section>.*')
str = 'df  <section id="1">2</section> fdd <section id="3">4</section> fd'
m = p.findall(str)
for eachentry in m:
    print 'id=[{}], text=[{}]'.format(eachentry[0], eachentry[1])

output:

id=[3], text=[4]

why it's extracting only the last occurrence? if i remove the last occurrence the first one is found

Answer 1

The .* at the beginning is very greedy and it consumes till the last occurrence. In fact all the .* in the expression are very greedy. So, we make them non-greedy with ?, like this

p = re.compile(r'.*?<section\s*id="(.+?)">(.+?)</section>.*?')

And the output becomes

id=[1], text=[2]
id=[3], text=[4]

In fact, you can drop the first and last .* patterns and keep it simple like this

p = re.compile(r'<section\s*id="(.+?)">(.+?)</section>')

Answer 2

Your regular expression needs to be changed as follows:

p = re.compile(r'<section\s*id="(.+?)">(.+?)</section>')