I use BeautifulSoup for extracting information between html tags. Suppose you want to extract a division like this : <div class='article_body' itemprop='articleBody'>...</div>
then you can use beautifulsoup and extract this division by:
soup = BeautifulSoup(<htmltext>) # creating bs object
ans = soup.find('div', {'class':'article_body', 'itemprop':'articleBody'})
also see the official documentation of bs4
as an example i have edited your code for extracting a division form an article of bloomberg you can make your own changes
import urllib
import re
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
def scrape():
url = 'http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-20/chinese-group-considers-south-africa-platinum-bids-amid-strikes.html'
htmlfile = urllib.urlopen(url)
htmltext = htmlfile.read()
soup = BeautifulSoup(htmltext)
ans = soup.find('div', {'class':'article_body', 'itemprop':'articleBody'})
print ans
scrape()
You can BeautifulSoup from here
P.S. : I use scrapy and BeautifulSoup for web scraping and I am satisfied with it