Does MechanicalSoup offer any built-in support for regular expressions?

MechanicalSoup is a Python library for automating interaction with websites. It provides a simple API for navigating and manipulating web pages via Python code. MechanicalSoup acts as a wrapper around the libraries Requests (for HTTP requests) and BeautifulSoup (for parsing HTML).

While MechanicalSoup itself does not offer built-in support for regular expressions, it leverages BeautifulSoup for parsing and navigating the HTML content of pages, and BeautifulSoup does support regular expressions through its various methods for searching and matching tags and strings.

Here's how you can use regular expressions with BeautifulSoup, and consequently with MechanicalSoup:

1. Searching for tags with a regular expression: You can use regular expressions to search for tags whose names match a pattern.

import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import mechanicalsoup

# Create a browser object
browser = mechanicalsoup.Browser()

# Use the browser to get a page
page = browser.get('http://example.com')

# Parse the page with BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(page.text, 'html.parser')

# Use a regular expression to find all tag names starting with 'h' (like h1, h2, h3, etc.)
for tag in soup.find_all(re.compile("^h")):
    print(tag.name)

1. Searching for tags with attributes matching a regular expression: You can find tags with attributes that match a certain pattern using regular expressions.

# Find all 'a' tags with an 'href' attribute that contains 'example'
for a_tag in soup.find_all('a', href=re.compile('example')):
    print(a_tag['href'])

1. Searching for strings with a regular expression: You can also search for strings within tags that match a regular expression.

# Find all strings that contain 'example'
for string in soup.find_all(string=re.compile('example')):
    print(string)

Keep in mind that using regular expressions for HTML parsing can be error-prone and is generally less preferred than using more robust parsing methods. However, they can be powerful when used appropriately for specific tasks, such as filtering results based on complex patterns.

In summary, while MechanicalSoup does not directly offer regular expressions support, you can utilize regular expressions in conjunction with BeautifulSoup methods to achieve your web scraping goals.