Can I take out just the username and not the href link?

Question

Today I have a big problem and I have been looking at many different methods over a few hours and none of them are working for me.

I have tried

Get Between Functions
Regex
HTML Agility Pack

The problem is in VB.NET and I want to grab out the title of a film and ignore the html link before it. But the problem is I cant because the link changes for every title, and I do not understand Regex to create the code for it.

Here is the code and the part which says Movie Link 1 is what I want to grab.

<a href="/download/fast-and-furious-7-2015-hd-ts-xvid-ac3-hq-hive-cm8-t10472303.html" class="cellMainLink">**Movie Link 1**</a>

and of course there is other titles I need to grab too. So the code I got for it is this and it is not working.

Dim r As New System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex("class=""cellMainLink"">(?<name>.*)</a>")
    Dim matches As MatchCollection = r.Matches(rssourcecode)


    For Each itemcode As Match In matches
        ListBox1.Items.Add(itemcode.Groups(2).Value)
    Next

To anyone who can help me please get back to me as soon as possible.

Thank you.

[You can't parse HMTL with regex](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454). — The Blue Dog, Apr 27 '15 at 18:35
I removed the tags from your title: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19190/should-questions-include-tags-in-their-titles — Jens, Apr 27 '15 at 18:38

Wiktor Stribiżew · Answer 1 · 2015-04-27T18:41:47.130

0

Using HTML Agility Pack you can use this code:

Dim links As New List(Of String)()
Dim htmlDoc As New HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument()
htmlDoc.LoadHtml(WebSource)
For Each link As HtmlNode In htmlDoc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//a[@class]")
    Dim att As HtmlAttribute = link.Attributes("class")
    If att.Value = "cellMainLink" Then
        links.Add(link.Value)
    End If
Next

I do not believe you need a regex solution here. However, just for the educational purpose:

Dim ptrn As String = "<a\b[^>]*?class=[""']?cellMainLink[""']?[^>]*?>(.*?)</a>"
Dim input As String = "<a href=""/download/fast-and-furious-7-2015-hd-ts-xvid-ac3-hq-hive-cm8-t10472303.html"" class=""cellMainLink"">**Movie Link 1**</a>"
Dim dds As List(Of String) = New List(Of String)
Dim rx As Regex = New Regex(ptrn)
Dim result As String = rx.Match(input).Groups(1).Value

Result: **Movie Link 1**

edited Apr 27 '15 at 18:41

answered Apr 27 '15 at 18:35

Wiktor Stribiżew

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I was looking at your HTML Agility pack code but I dont know how implement that into my code. – SheppoCoder Apr 28 '15 at 14:34
What about regex? If your `` tag value spans across multiple lines, you can add `(?s)` inline option: `Dim ptrn As String = "(?s)]*?class=[""']?cellMainLink[""']?[^>]*?>(.*?)"`. – Wiktor Stribiżew Apr 28 '15 at 17:38
Either I am wrong with the way im getting this data or you are misunderstood. Sorry dont mean to sound rude but just saying I dont have a clue how to implement that code – SheppoCoder Apr 29 '15 at 19:37
Do you mean to say you do not know how to use a `Regex` object? Just add `Imports System.Text.RegularExpressions` at the top of the file. For Agility Pack, you need to install it as a NuGet package (right click the solution name and select Manage NuGetPackages, then search for it, and install. See http://htmlagilitypack.codeplex.com/) – Wiktor Stribiżew Apr 29 '15 at 19:55
I know how to install regex and Agility Pack but when I use a web client to download the site and regex to scrape the code it doesn't work. – SheppoCoder Apr 30 '15 at 10:29
Please use http://pastebin.com/ to share the contents you are parsing, and I will try to provide a working solution. – Wiktor Stribiżew Apr 30 '15 at 10:33
I am sorry, we have a public holiday, I am busy with family matters right now, I will check once I have spare minute. – Wiktor Stribiżew May 01 '15 at 14:38
You can add the links extracted this way: `ListBox1.Items.Add(itemcode.Groups(1).Value)`. I do not know what you want to do with `Split`, but if you want to add String[] elements to a listbox, you need to use `AddRange()` method: `ListBox1.Items.AddRange(itemcode.Groups(1).Value.Split(""))`. However, this will just print the former value. – Wiktor Stribiżew May 02 '15 at 07:23

Can I take out just the username and not the href link?

1 Answers1