Regex optional substring

Question

I am having a hard time getting the right regex for the following

What I want: Three matches (John Doe, , Jane Doe)

The problems are the optional anchor tag and that there can be empty results.

String to search:

<td class="character">
  <a href=""> John Doe </a>

</td>
<td class="character">

</td>
<td class="character">
  Jane Doe 

</td>

My regex so far: @<td class="character">.*?(?:<a.*?>)?(.*?)(?:</a>)?.*?</td>@gms

I know you shouldn't use regex to parse xml/html, but as I only use it to dig through a tiny subset of html it should be possible, right?

Possible duplicate of [RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags) — Zenoo, Jul 25 '18 at 13:53
Try this: `]+>\s+(?:]+>)?\s+([^<]+?)\s+(?:)?\s+`. By the way, you should really have a look at @Zenoo's comment — Wololo, Jul 25 '18 at 14:06
@user2610665 Sure thing. BTW, I just improved it a bit, if you haven't noticed — Wololo, Jul 25 '18 at 14:11

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 25 '18 at 14:16

0

You could use this simple regex:

@<td[^>]+>\s+(?:<a[^>]+>)?\s+([^<]+?)\s+(?:</a>)?\s+</td>@gms

answered Jul 25 '18 at 14:16

Wololo

1 Answers1