Regular Expressions To Extract All Images And HTML

Question

I'm trying to figure out the regular expressions for the following and can't seem to get it right. Can someone advise me?

In a nutshell I have an htmlString which is:

        htmlString = "<HTML><HEAD></HEAD><BODY>Here are some images.</br>1) <IMG style='MARGIN-BOTTOM: 20px; MARGIN-LEFT: 20px' align=right src='images/sample001.jpg'>2) <IMG style='MARGIN-BOTTOM: 25px; MARGIN-LEFT: 25px' align=right src='images/sample002.png'></br> And some docs as well.</br>1) href='javascript:parent.POPUP({url:'testDoc001.htm',type:'shared',width:600,height:645})'></br>2) href='javascript:parent.POPUP({url:'testDoc002.html',type:'shared',width:700,height:712})'></br></BODY></HTML>";

I run this through the following routine in C#, WPF:

    private static List<string> ExtractData(string htmlString)
    {
        List<string> data = new List<string>();

        //***  Get The Images ***
        string pattern = @"<img .* src='(.+\.(jpg|bmp|png))'";

        Regex rgx = new Regex(pattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
        MatchCollection matches = rgx.Matches(htmlString);

        for (int i = 0, l = matches.Count; i < l; i++)
        {
            data.Add(matches[i].Value);
        }

        //***  Get Html Pages ***
        pattern = @"url:'([^']*)'";

        rgx = new Regex(pattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
        matches = rgx.Matches(htmlString);

        for (int i = 0, l = matches.Count; i < l; i++)
        {
            data.Add(matches[i].Value);
        }

        return data;
    }--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

and the result I get is:

[0] = "< IMG style='MARGIN-BOTTOM: 20px; MARGIN-LEFT: 20px' align=right src='images/sample001.jpg'>2) < IMG style='MARGIN-BOTTOM: 25px; MARGIN-LEFT: 25px' align=right src='images/sample002.png'"

[1] = "url:'testDoc001.htm'"

[2] = "url:'testDoc002.html'"

What I really want is:

[0] = "images/sample001.jpg"

[1] = "images/sample002.png"

[2] = "testDoc001.htm"

[3] = "testDoc002.html"

Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong in my Regular Expression?

Thanks

See the first answer here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags — Cfreak, Apr 16 '12 at 14:00
What you want is probably doable through regular expressions, but it won't be as neat and tidy as you'd expect. You should really use a parser to do this. http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/355724 — VeeArr, Apr 16 '12 at 14:00
possible duplicate of [Regular Expression to get the SRC of images in C#](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4257359/regular-expression-to-get-the-src-of-images-in-c-sharp) — H H, Apr 16 '12 at 14:25

David Brabant · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-16T14:28:02.763

1

You'd better use the HTML Agility Pack for such work. As mentioned by others, regex for parsing HTML, besides very specific cases, is a baaaad thing. Anyway, there are several problems with your regexs. The first one should resemble this:

<img.+?src\s*=\s*\'(.*?\.(jpg|bmp|png))'

edited Apr 16 '12 at 14:28

answered Apr 16 '12 at 14:07

David Brabant

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Regular Expressions To Extract All Images And HTML

1 Answers1