Python Issue with unexpected end of pattern

Question

I'm doing small project on sentiment Analysis using twitter data. I have the sample csv file containing the data. but before doing the sentiment analysis part. I have to clean up the data. There is one part that I am stuck. Here's the code.

tweets['source'][2]   ## Source is an attribute in csv file containing values
Out[51]: u'<a href="http://twitter.com/download/android" rel="nofollow">Twitter for Android</a>'

I want to clean the source(data). I don't want the the values to be shown with web links and the tags.

Here's the code for cleaning the source:

tweets['source_new'] = ''

for i in range(len(tweets['source'])):
    m = re.search('(?)(.*)', tweets['source'][i])
    try:
        tweets['source_new'][i]=m.group(0)
    except AttributeError:
        tweets['source_new'][i]=tweets['source'][i]

tweets['source_new'] = tweets['source_new'].str.replace('', ' ', case=False)

But when I executed the code. I got this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "<ipython-input-50-f92a7f05ad1d>", line 2, in <module>
    m = re.search('(?)(.*)', tweets['source'][i])

  File "C:\Users\aneeq\Anaconda2\lib\re.py", line 146, in search
    return _compile(pattern, flags).search(string)

  File "C:\Users\aneeq\Anaconda2\lib\re.py", line 251, in _compile
    raise error, v # invalid expression

error: unexpected end of pattern

I got an error saying 'error: unexpected end of pattern". Can any help me with this? I can't find the issue of the code that I am working on.

Answer 1

I should start by stating that using a regular expression for this task is not a good idea¹²

Being that said, I see two ways to accomplish this depending on your context:

If you don't really know what tags you are going to encounter

We can get the HTML text value doing the following:

# Replace any HTML tag with empty string
value = re.sub('<[^>]*>', '', tweets['source'][i])
tweets['source_new'] = value

If you know what tags you are going to encounter (recommended)

This would be my recommended approach (if you really need to use regular expressions), as it is more explicit and less prone to any surprises.

# Replace any HTML "a" tag with empty string
value = re.sub('(?i)<\/?a[^>]*>', '', tweets['source'][i])
tweets['source_new'] = value