Regex to find links of hrefs and img src in HTML code

Question

I want to make a regex that will match links in HTML code. This is example that will explain it better. Something like this:

<a href="I NEED THIS1">  <img src="I NEED THIS2">  </a>  <a href="I DONT
NEED THIS" title="something">  </a>   <a href="I NEED THIS3" title="blah">
<figure> <img src="I NEED THIS4" alt="">   </figure>  </a>

I tried something like this, but it matches I DONT NEED THIS instead of I NEED THIS3.

<a href="([^"]*)"\s*.*?<img src="(.*?)".*?\s*<\/a>

I tried to add negative lookahead with , but no matter where I put it, it is like I didn't add it at all. I am not sure I understand negative lookahead correct, but I tried to add (?!</a>).

I used regex that finds words near each other, and it works, but it is really not very elegant solution :) It finds href and img src when distance between is 0 and 7 words:

<a href="([^"]*)"\W+(?:\w+\W+){0,7}?<img src="(.*?)".*?\s*<\/a>

It will be used in Excel VBA and I was testing it on online regex tester websites.
Any suggestion would be helpful.

If you are reading HTML from the Web, you can use `InternetExplorer.Application` object. Then, you can parse the DOM easily, maybe easier than with the regex. — Wiktor Stribiżew, May 26 '16 at 12:09
I need it to be done with regex and needs to be solved with one expression only. Two pass would be probably easier, but unfortunately not allowed to use it. — vlayausa, May 26 '16 at 12:25
Thank you, Wiktor. It looks like that this is the correct regex, it is working good for me. I will test it some more. Could you please try to explain this part of expresion: (?:(?!<\/?a\b[^<]*>)[\s\S])* — vlayausa, May 26 '16 at 12:43
Yeah, Wiktor, this definitely works. Thanks so much, you rock! :) — vlayausa, May 26 '16 at 13:33

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 26 '16 at 12:13

1

Use the MSHTML parser:

Dim odoc As Object: Set odoc = CreateObject("htmlfile")
odoc.Open
odoc.Write htmlstr

For Each element In odoc.images
    MsgBox element.src
Next

For Each element In odoc.getElementsByTagName("a")
    MsgBox element.href
Next

You may need to remove a leading "about:" prefix.

answered May 26 '16 at 12:13

Alex K.

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This is correct according the famous advice at http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/122139 that has helped thousands. – Smandoli May 26 '16 at 13:00

tk78 · Answer 2 · 2016-05-27T05:51:09.697

0

Here's another solution.

(href="([^"]+).*(?=img src))|(img src="([^"]*))

check for href="
return everything before the next " -> first group you're interested in
but only if there is img src following (positive lookahead)
check for img src="
return everything before the next " -> second group you're interested in

Demo: https://regex101.com/r/yS9bB4/1

edited May 27 '16 at 05:51

answered May 26 '16 at 12:29

tk78

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[`(href="([^"]+).*(?=img src))|(img src="([^"]*))`](https://regex101.com/r/lU4wT7/1) demo. – Wiktor Stribiżew May 26 '16 at 12:31

Regex to find links of hrefs and img src in HTML code

2 Answers2