How do I return a string from a regex match in python?

I am running through lines in a text file using a python script.
I want to search for an img tag within the text document and return the tag as text.

When I run the regex re.match(line) it returns a _sre.SRE_MATCH object.
How do I get it to return a string?

import sys
import string
import re

f = open("sample.txt", 'r' )
l = open('writetest.txt', 'w')

count = 1

for line in f:
    line = line.rstrip()
    imgtag  = re.match(r'<img.*?>',line)
    print("yo it's a {}".format(imgtag))

When run it prints:

yo it's a None
yo it's a None
yo it's a None
yo it's a <_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x7fd4ea90e578>
yo it's a None
yo it's a <_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x7fd4ea90e578>
yo it's a None
yo it's a <_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x7fd4ea90e578>
yo it's a <_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x7fd4ea90e5e0>
yo it's a None
yo it's a None

Answers:

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Method 1

You should use re.MatchObject.group(0). Like

imtag = re.match(r'<img.*?>', line).group(0)

Edit:

You also might be better off doing something like

imgtag  = re.match(r'<img.*?>',line)
if imtag:
    print("yo it's a {}".format(imgtag.group(0)))

to eliminate all the Nones.

Method 2

imgtag.group(0) or imgtag.group(). This returns the entire match as a string. You are not capturing anything else either.

http://docs.python.org/release/2.5.2/lib/match-objects.html

Method 3

Note that re.match(pattern, string, flags=0) only returns matches at the beginning of the string. If you want to locate a match anywhere in the string, use re.search(pattern, string, flags=0) instead (https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html). This will scan the string and return the first match object. Then you can extract the matching string with match_object.group(0) as the folks suggested.

Method 4

Considering there might be several img tags I would recommend re.findall:

import re

with open("sample.txt", 'r') as f_in, open('writetest.txt', 'w') as f_out:
    for line in f_in:
        for img in re.findall('<img[^>]+>', line):
            print >> f_out, "yo it's a {}".format(img)

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0