How to get text inside href?

Question

I'm trying to get the text inside an href link, in particular I've this:

<a href="/matches/2015/02/07/italy/serie-a/juventus-fc/ac-milan/1836527/" class="form-icon form-win " title="Juventus - Milan 3 - 1">W</a>

So I made this regex:

.giornata_1_casa_flag = Regex.Match(Casa_Rgx(0).Value, "/<a [^>]*href=""?([^"">]+)""?>/").Groups(2).ToString

the pattern, however, don't get any value. I'm waiting a result like: W. This character allow me to execute many control.

[Don't parse HTML with regex!](http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/418066) — Biffen, Feb 09 '15 at 15:26
Are you sure regex is the right tool for the job here? Maybe an HTML *parser* would be a better tool. — Damien_The_Unbeliever, Feb 09 '15 at 15:26
What you want the output string to be? string within href or the value of a tag? — Avinash Raj, Feb 09 '15 at 15:26
You can use regex here. A HTML parser is over the top for a simple job like this. — QuentinUK, Feb 09 '15 at 15:32
Yeah I know it, but it is only for learn. As I said in the main post, I want to get the text in the href tag, especially in this tag contains the letter w — Anton Ego, Feb 09 '15 at 15:35
@QuentinUK: well you even need to escape a href sometimes. For instance if one uses a space, it should be replaced with `%20`. So things are more complicated than one thinks. — Willem Van Onsem, Feb 09 '15 at 15:36

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 09 '15 at 15:43

I would try to search for any text between > and </a>, probably not the best approach, but it depends on the html you have.

Here is the pattern: (?<=>)[a-z\s]*(?=<\/a>)

(?<=>) - positive lookbehind, means that before text should be > sign

(?=<\/a>) - positive lookahead, means that text should be followed by </a>

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 07 '17 at 09:49

0

using jQuery

var link = "<a href=''>Text link</a>"
var textLink = $(link).text();

answered Jun 07 '17 at 09:49

Irfan Soetedja

2 Answers2