Why doesn't this string matches my regex?

Question

I have the following regex for capturing links in tags (the tags are given in a string without the angular brackets):

^a .*href=['\"]([^'\"]*)['\"].*

and I have the following string:

a href="/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol" title="Hypertext Transfer Protocol"

And this string isn't captured by the regex. It seems fine to me, can you tell me what's wrong?

I does work for me, match group 1: `/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol`. Are you really applying it only on this string? — Czechnology, Apr 03 '11 at 16:05
what language is this in? different languages have slightly different regex methods. — drysdam, Apr 03 '11 at 16:06
group 1 is captured correctly, but the entire regex is rejected for some reason. — Amir Rachum, Apr 03 '11 at 16:07
[Don't use Regex to parse HTML](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags) — Eric, Apr 03 '11 at 16:19
If group 1 was captured, the regex matched. Are you sure you are not trying to `find()` a match twice? — Simon G., Apr 03 '11 at 16:58
If you're using a Java Pattern to create a Matcher for your string make sure you call matches() first before checking the groups. — Mike Deck, Apr 03 '11 at 18:09

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 03 '11 at 17:44

2

For Java's java.util.regex package, Matcher.match only matches when the whole input sequence matches the regex. If you want to search a text inside another, use matcher.find instead. And of course, you have to reset the matcher between matches if you don't want the second find to start searching after the end of the first one.

answered Apr 03 '11 at 17:44

Paŭlo Ebermann

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I added `$` at the end. Thanks. – Amir Rachum Apr 03 '11 at 20:46

Why doesn't this string matches my regex?

1 Answers1