re.search returning empty tuple

Question

f=open("galcode.txt")
for element in f:
 galcode_scan = re.search(ur'http://i\.imgur\.com/\w{5,8}', element)
 if galcode_scan:
    print galcode_scan.groups()
f.close()  

Galcode.txt in this instance is html of a gallery on imgur. I am trying to get a list of all the links to a gallery that gets posted to imgur. If I run this after inputting the gallery name and recieving the galcode all I get is about 15 (). How do I get the list of links?

Thanks

Answer 1

You do not have any capture groups, so .groups() is returning an empty tuple. Use .group() instead or surround your regex with parentheses (ur'(http://i\.imgur\.com/\w{5,8})').

That said, I strongly suggest using something like BeautifulSoup, cssselect or any other HTML parsing library.

Answer 2

The easiest way you can do it is to use a HTML parser such as Beaufitul Soup. It's available for Python 2.7 and 3.