How to get tag content with regexp?

Question

My string <a href="/?an=mb_artist&uid=40574" target="_blank">Maroon 5</a> - <a href="/?an=mb_track&uid=151311">One More Night</a>

Try to get content of a tags with regexp /<a.*>(.*)<\/a>/ig , but get only "One More Night", how to get "Maroon 5" and "One More Night" ?

It might help to show us the code you are running - the problem is as likely to be the way you are retrieving the results as it is with the expression itself. — glenatron, Aug 22 '14 at 11:42
[You can't parse HTML with regex.](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags) — Ortiga, Aug 22 '14 at 11:43

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 22 '14 at 11:46

1

In javascript you have got much more beautifull means of working with markup DOM.

For example jQuery library...

See my fiddle example: http://jsfiddle.net/3kfcp156/

    $(document).ready(function() {
        $('a').each(function(item,idx) {
            alert($(this).text());
        });
     });

answered Aug 22 '14 at 11:46

michalh

2,907
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29

thanks, but I want with regexp, in your example want to add: var a = 'Maroon 5 - One More Night'; $(a).filter("a").each(function(item,idx) { alert($(this).text()); }); – socm_ Aug 22 '14 at 12:13
why? you can convert html to string and parse it – socm_ Aug 22 '14 at 13:59

Peter van der Wal · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-22T12:00:18.360

Add a question-mark after the *. Without an question-mark the regular expressions tries to match as many as characters as possible (greedy mode). With the question-mark as little as possible.

/<a.*?>(.*?)<\/a>/ig

Without:

    /<a.*>(.*)<\/a>/ig
//   ^^^^^ this part matches: <a href="/?an=mb_artist&uid=40574" target="_blank">Maroon 5</a> - <a href="/?an=mb_track&uid=151311">

Demo: http://regex101.com/r/hX1aD1/2

Update:

var myRe = /<a.*?>(.*?)<\/a>/ig;
var myArray;
while ((myArray = myRe.exec(str)) !== null)
{
  var content = myArray[1];
  // do something with it
}

How to get tag content with regexp?

2 Answers2