How do i parse the date start and date end value using beautifulsoup?
<h2 name="PRM-013113-21017-0FSNS" class="pointer">
<a name="PRM-013113-21017-0FSNS">Chinese New Year Sale<br>
<span>February 8, 2013 - February 10, 2013</span>
</a>
</h2>
Something like this.
import re
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
html = '<h2 name="PRM-013113-21017-0FSNS" class="pointer"><a name="PRM-013113-21017-0FSNS">Chinese New Year Sale<br><span>February 8, 2013 - February 10, 2013</span></a></h2>'
date_span = BeautifulSoup(html).findAll('h2', {'class' : 'pointer'})[0].findAll('span')[0]
date = re.findall(r'<span>(.+?)</span>', str(date_span))[0]
(PS: you can also use BeautifulSoup's text=True method with findAll to get the text instead of using regex as follows.)
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
html = '<h2 name="PRM-013113-21017-0FSNS" class="pointer"><a name="PRM-013113-21017-0FSNS">Chinese New Year Sale<br><span>February 8, 2013 - February 10, 2013</span></a></h2>'
date = BeautifulSoup(test).findAll('h2', {'class' : 'pointer'})[0].findAll('span')[0]
date = date.findAll(text=True)[0]
To have a start and end date as separate variables you can simply split them you can simply split the date variable as follows:
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
html = '<h2 name="PRM-013113-21017-0FSNS" class="pointer"><a name="PRM-013113-21017-0FSNS">Chinese New Year Sale<br><span>February 8, 2013 - February 10, 2013</span></a></h2>'
date = BeautifulSoup(test).findAll('h2', {'class' : 'pointer'})[0].findAll('span')[0]
date = date.findAll(text=True)[0]
# Get start and end date separately
date_start, date_end = date.split(' - ')
now date_start variable contains the starting date and date_end variable contains the ending date.
