Cannot seem to get this regular expression down

Question

I have a string:

<a href="mailto:me@company.com">Joel Werner</a>

and I need to strip everything off but my name

The expression I have now, almost does that.

var pattern = new System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex(">(?<name>.+?)<");

But when I match them I get

>Joel Werner<

What am I missing, because I do not really like regular expressions

Unless you are parsing a very simple string like that, I suggest using an HTML parser instead of regex. — Oded, Feb 04 '13 at 19:14

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 04 '13 at 19:13

Use groups to get matched name:

var name = pattern.Match(input).Groups["name"].Value;

You can also verify Success of match before referencing group:

var match = pattern.Match(input);
if (match.Success)
    name = match.Groups["name"].Value;

Also you can reference group by index Groups[1].

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:04

If you don't like regular expressions, don't use them in this case. Parsing HTML with regular expressions is usually very bad. See this answer on why.

Using CsQuery:

Console.WriteLine(CQ.Create("<a href=\"mailto:me@company.com\">Joel Werner</a>"). //create the selector
Attr("href"). //get the href attribute
Split(new char[]{':','@'})[1]); //split it by : and @ and take the second group (after the mailto)

Using built in LINQ to XML:

 XDocument doc = XDocument.Parse("<a href=\"mailto:me@company.com\">Joel Werner</a>");
 Console.WriteLine(doc.Element("a").Attribute("href").ToString().Split(new char[] {':', '@'})[1]);

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 04 '13 at 19:14

0

Use this Regex

<([A-Z][A-Z0-9]*)\b[^>]*>(.*?)</\1>

then use 2nd match, first match is tag type.

answered Feb 04 '13 at 19:14

Senad Meškin

13,597
4
37
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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 04 '13 at 20:26

0

var input = "<a href=\"mailto:me@company.com\">Joel Werner</a>";
var pattern = new System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex(@"<a\shref=""(?<url>.*?)"">(?<name>.*?)</a>");
var match = pattern.Match(input);
var name = match.Groups["name"].Value;

answered Feb 04 '13 at 20:26

kodelab

21
2

Cannot seem to get this regular expression down

4 Answers4