Date time regular expression help

[crashhold]

Hello Developers,

I am a beginner in python and need help with writing a regular expression for date and time to be fetched from a html document. In the following code I am walking through the html files in a folder called event and printing the headings with h1 tag using beautifulsoup. These html pages also contains different formats of date and time. I want to fetch and display this information as well. Different formats of date in these html documents are:

21 - 27 Nov 2012
1 Dec 2012
30 Nov - 2 Dec 2012
26 Nov 2012

Can someone help me out with fetching these formats from these html documents ?
Here is my code for walking through the files:

import re
import os
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

for subdir, dirs, files in os.walk("/home/himanshu/event/"):
    for fle in files:
        path = os.path.join(subdir, fle)    
        soup = BeautifulSoup(open(path))

        print (soup.h1.string)

        #Date and Time detection

[rrashkin]

for the first type, 21 - 27 Nov 2012:

`

import re
s="abcd efgh 44 - 88 Dec 2012 xyz"
pat=r'\d{1,2} - \d{1,2} \w{3} \d{4}'
m=re.search(pat,s)
m.group(0)
'44 - 88 Dec 2012'
'

for 1 Dec 2012 and 26 Nov 2012:
pat=r'\d{1,2} \w{3} \d{4}

for 30 Nov - 2 Dec 2012:
pat=r'\d{1,2} \w{3} - \d{1,2} \w{3} \d{4}

[snippsat]

Hi rrashkin nice to see you here,do you know status of "python-forum.org"?

[crashhold]

Hi rrashkin, thanks for your reply but I don't understand this following line of code

s="abcd efgh 44 - 88 Dec 2012 xyz"

what is it actually doing ?

[rrashkin]

@crashhold:
That was just setting a string with the target pattern to demonstrate that the search would actually find it. In your case, you would be reading in the string so it's unnecessary.

@snippsat:
It's up, but empty. I had to set up a new user account to get in so I don't know if my previous "status" will be preserved. I feel like Ozimandius.

[crashhold]

@rrashkin Thanks a lot for your help !