Regular Expression to select name from following code

Question

alt="Abdul Aziz" width="75" height="75" class="thumb-border"></td>

I want to select "Abdul Aziz" from the html above. How should I do this? It must be generic as I have to select many names from similar looking HTML.

What platform? What language? Do you realize that regex tends to be a [poor choice for parsing HTML](http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/1583)? — Oded, Dec 31 '12 at 21:23
It's not always wise to use regex on HTML. There are nice parsing libraries for almost all platform, might give that a try. — SWeko, Dec 31 '12 at 21:24
Could you please mention the whole tag ? if you are using jQuery or YUI you could use selector. — Mehdi Karamosly, Dec 31 '12 at 21:24
Client-side Javascript is _especially_ well equipped to getting an attribute of an existing element. If you have jQuery, you can do it just as easily _and_ with a shorter syntax than with vanilla.js — John Dvorak, Dec 31 '12 at 21:26
Well actually it was an assignment of my subject Java Development I was forced to do this with RE using java by Professor — Usman Tahir, Dec 31 '12 at 21:29

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 31 '12 at 21:25

1

Not sure what language you are using, but here's a pattern that would start to get you there. Beware that parsing HTML with regexes has all sorts of downsides.

"/alt=\"(.*?)\".*?>/"

This will retrieve the stuff between alt="" into the first capture group.

answered Dec 31 '12 at 21:25

DWright

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Not sure "beware that ..." cuts it. – John Dvorak Dec 31 '12 at 21:27
Really depends on how much/what parsing. Very targeted, very limited use of regexes for this purpose may be the most practical in some scenarios. – DWright Jan 01 '13 at 05:06

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 31 '12 at 21:27

1

alt="[\w\s]+"

Will select the whole statement, and then you can remove the alt and quotes with your code.

answered Dec 31 '12 at 21:27

Will Richardson

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 31 '12 at 21:29

Using Javascript would be more consistent:

//You can get elements by tag :
els = document.getElementsByTag('td');

// or you can get elements by class name :
els = document.getElementsByClassName('thumb-border');

and then iterate through your elements and read the alt attribute.

or if using jQuery you can use selector:

http://api.jquery.com/category/selectors/

Regular Expression to select name from following code

3 Answers3