Looking for regex to erase href text

Question

If I have a bunch of urls like this:

<li><a href="http://www.xyz.com/sometext/someothertext/123/sometext/">Xyz 123</a></li>  
<li><a href="http://www.xyz.com/345/sometext/someothertext/">Xyz 345</a></li>

What would a regex look like to erase the urls inside the hrefs so that they become:

<li><a href="">Xyz 123</a></li> 
<li><a href="">Xyz 345</a></li>

Answer 1

The following should do what you like:

/href=\"([^\"]*)\"/

Basically match href="<any text but a '"'>".

Answer 2

Search for <a href="[^"]*" and replace with <a href="".

If you add more details about which language you're using, I can be more specific. Be aware also that regular expressions are usually not the tool of choice when dealing with HTML.

Answer 3

First of all, do not use regex to parse HTML — why? Have a look here or here.

Process the HTML using an XML reader / XML document processing engine. Then use XPath to find nodes matching your criteria and alter href attributes in the DOM.

Note: For HTML which is not well-formed XML a more-general HTML (SGML) parser is required.

Answer 4

I partially agree with the others but a more complete version would be

/(<a[^>]+href\s*=\s*\")(.*?)("[^>]*>)/$1$3/gi