What is the regex code for meta description

Question

I am looking for a regex code for a meta description tag.

#<meta|name="description|".*content|="([^"]+)"># <-

That is what I have, but it doesn't match capital letters, as I discovered some tags are like META DESCRIPTION =, etc.

Is there a new code or a way to change this one to match capital letter content?

That regex doesn't match how you think it does. The problem here is not about capital letters. For example, it would also match the string "foocontent" — memowe, Sep 23 '12 at 10:02
the problem with your regex (not counting that it has bunch of `OR` in it) is that meta doesn't always have to be formatted this way... can have spaces, line breaks, different quotes... if it's for scrapping purposes, I would suggest to gather all meta tags and then process it - like this: `~]+>~is` — Flash Thunder, Sep 13 '19 at 09:38

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 23 '12 at 08:55

1

Add flag i after your last #.

Like this:

#<meta|name="description|".*content|="([^"]+)">#i

That will tell your regular expression to be case insensitive. Read more about flags here.

answered Sep 23 '12 at 08:55

Nikola K.

7,093
13
31
39

I don't know. This seems to be wrong. I mean why would we search for ` – Flash Thunder Sep 13 '19 at 09:34

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:43

1

Your regex <meta|name="description|".*content|="([^"]+)"> is broken, it means:

<meta
OR
name="description
OR
" followed by anything followed by content
OR
=" followed by at least one character that is not " followed by ">

Warning!

Let me say that parsing HTML with regular expressions is a very bad idea.

Regex alternative for training purposes

But if you want to try something out for training, start improving this:

#<meta name="description" content="([^"]+)">#i

which is case-insensitive and does what you think it does.

False negatives

Beware that it won't match valid elements like this:

<meta name="description"      content="foo bar baz">

or

<meta
   name="description"
   content="foo bar baz">

or

<meta content="foo bar baz" name="description">

edited May 23 '17 at 11:43

Community

1
1

answered Sep 23 '12 at 12:17

memowe

2,656
16
25

1

Well, at least the problem with the whitespaces could be alleviate, by replacing all space character with `\s+`. Otherwise, pretty good answer! – Martin Ender Sep 23 '12 at 19:49
and what if it's `` ? or even `` (that is a correct html syntax) – Flash Thunder Sep 13 '19 at 09:40

score 1 · Answer 3 · 2013-09-23T06:45:45.160

1

You can use it like this:

/<meta[^>]*name=[\"|\']description[\"|\'][^>]*content=[\"]([^\"]*)[\"][^>]*>/i

works for compressed html code too.

edited Sep 23 '13 at 06:45

answered Sep 23 '13 at 06:37

You may want to account for the fact that either a double or single quote could follow `content=` so the regex would become `/]*name=[\"\']description[\"\'][^>]*content=[\"\'](.*?)[\"\'][^>]*>/i` – Mike Godin Mar 16 '15 at 14:30

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 07 '15 at 11:02

1

Check this php function to get all meta details including description easily.

answered Mar 07 '15 at 11:02

Web_Developer

1,251
2
18
34

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Sep 13 '19 at 09:32

0

<meta\s+(?=[^>]*name\s*=\s*("|')description\1)[^>]*content\s*=\s*("|')(.*?)\2[^>]*>

answered Sep 13 '19 at 09:32

bavo

469
4
5

Hi, maybe you can add a small explanation to improve your answer. – Cettt Sep 13 '19 at 11:27

What is the regex code for meta description

5 Answers5

Warning!

Regex alternative for training purposes

False negatives