Regular expression on raw HTML

Question

I am getting raw html from one site in javascript.

Here is the example part:

<a href="/?Stat=5&item=10739">Coldwater</a></b>

Now I use exec to pull some data out with pattern:

Stat=5&item=(\d.*)">(.*)<\/a><\/b>

It works fine in regex tester (link), problem is how to write in js, currently I have this code (returns null):

$.get(link,function(data) {
    var raw = data,
        pattern = / Stat=5&item=(\d.*)">(.*)<\/a><\/b>/gi,
        matches = pattern.exec(raw);
    console.log(matches);
});

Probably I have to remove some single/double quotes, slashes from that raw html?

HTMl is a tree shaped data structure - consider loading the string into a DOM (either in the browser or JSDOM on the server depending on where your javaScript is running) and querying it using DOM methods. — mikemaccana, Sep 17 '14 at 09:03
Possible duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags But seriously, don't use regex, see what Mr_Green said. Put your data to a new element and get all `a` tag's `href`s — Mardoxx, Sep 17 '14 at 09:05

Mr_Green · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-17T09:13:05.517

7

Here there is no need to use regex. You can achieve the same by creating a new element.

var a = document.createElement('div'); 
a.innerHTML = yourString;
var result = a.children[0].href;

edited Sep 17 '14 at 09:13

answered Sep 17 '14 at 09:05

Mr_Green

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1

Since this is even better solution, I accept this answer, thank you. – Johncze Sep 17 '14 at 09:18

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 17 '14 at 09:07

Remove the space before the string Stat,

> var str = '<a href="/?Stat=5&item=10739">Coldwater</a></b>';
undefined
> console.log(/Stat=5&item=(\d.*)">(.*)<\/a><\/b>/gi.exec(str)[0]);
Stat=5&item=10739">Coldwater</a></b>
> console.log(/Stat=5&item=(\d.*)">(.*)<\/a><\/b>/gi.exec(str)[1]);
10739
> console.log(/Stat=5&item=(\d.*)">(.*)<\/a><\/b>/gi.exec(str)[2]);
Coldwater

Regular expression on raw HTML

2 Answers2