Python web scraping using 're' : I'm running into a wall why this code does not work, even thought it's the same code as on an online tutorial [Python Web Scraping Tutorial 5 (Network Requests)][1]. I tried running the code also via online Python interpreter.

    import urllib
    import re

    htmltext = urllib.urlopen("https://www.google.com/finance?q=AAPL")

    regex = '<span id="ref_[^.]*_l">(.+?)</span>'
    pattern = re.compile(regex)
    results = re.findall(pattern,htmltext)
    results

I get:

    re.pyc in findall(pattern, string, flags)
    175 
    176     Empty matches are included in the result."""
    --> 177     return _compile(pattern, flags).findall(string)
    178 
    179 if sys.hexversion >= 0x02020000:

    TypeError: expected string or buffer 

Expected result(s):

    112.71

Help appreciated. I tried using "read()" on the url but that didn't work. According to documentation even empty results should be included. Thanks

  [1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FoSwMZ4uJg&t=6m22s