Defining Regex in C#

Question

I would like to ask, how to define Regex in C#

i have a text box, where user will write name of author, who should be find. i want to define Regex which will find in HTML content

<span class ="author">John</span>
<span class ="song">Hooray</span>

something like: user put John into textbox, program retrieves him Hooray

My attempt:

MatchCollection m1 = Regex.Matches(html, @"<span class=("[\w\d]*")\sauthor=("[\w\d]*")>([\w\d]*)</span>", RegexOptions.Singleline);

You need to use an HTML parser and pass the value a user types into a text field as a part of an XPath expression. — Wiktor Stribiżew, Nov 29 '15 at 18:04
Yes, a parser is the correct tool. Using regex on HTML is almost always a bad idea. — Nate Barbettini, Nov 29 '15 at 18:39

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 29 '15 at 19:30

2

As stated in the comments, nothing good ever comes from using regex on HTML. However, if - and only if - the markup is as simple as in your example, you could probably get away with something like this:

    @"<span class=""author"">(?<author>[^<]+)</span>"

The authors name could be retrieved from match.Groups["author"].Value

answered Nov 29 '15 at 19:30

Henrik Nielsen

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Good answer, I'm very skeptical concerning the quality of the question. Shows a somewhat obvious lack of research – Samuel Allan Nov 29 '15 at 19:39

Defining Regex in C#

1 Answers1