In this section, we will use a simple method to extract the data we want from an HTML page. This method is based on the concept of identifying delimiters in the page and using pattern matching via regular expressions to pull out the data we want.

You may remember that we experimented a little bit with regular expressions (regex) in Chapter 3, Workhorses of Clean Data – Spreadsheets and Text Editors, when we were learning about text editors. In this chapter, some of the concepts will be similar, except we will write a Python program to find matching text and extract it instead of using a text editor for replacements like we did in that chapter.

One final note before we start the example, although this regex method is fairly easy to understand, it does have some limitations which could be significant, depending on your particular project. We will describe the limitations of this method in detail at the end of the section.