Regex - extract href of html tag

Question

I have this regex:

(?=<a .*href=")(.+)(?=".*>My Text<\/a>)

With this, I try to extract href value from an specific HTML tag <a> from an HTML.

Let's say I have this HTML:

<html>
<head>
    ...
</head>
<body>
    ...
     <a class="..." href="..." ..="..">My Text</a>
    ...
</body>
</html>

With my regex I get <a class="..." href="..." ..="..(stop before ">), but I want only href value.

Edit: this answer: regular expression for finding 'href' value of a <a> link don't help me. With that regex I get all tags <a> with all attributes of tag.

Is the format always fixed or it can change? can you post the whole example — Shivaraj, Oct 11 '19 at 13:46
@Shivaraj format of ``? Do you mean about order of attributes? If yes, not, is not fixed. — KunLun, Oct 11 '19 at 13:52
@NullPointerException that regex don't find my `href` it find me all tags `` with all attributes. — KunLun, Oct 11 '19 at 13:56
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags — chrylis -cautiouslyoptimistic-, Oct 11 '19 at 14:25

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 11 '19 at 13:59

2

Consider using an HTML parser instead. Regex often isn't powerful enough to parse HTML. For the example you posted, and fairly limited variations of it, the following should work:

<a[\s\S]*?href="([^"]+)"[\s\S]*?>

Demo

answered Oct 11 '19 at 13:59

Nick Reed

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Your regex is not 100% what I want (I need `` which have inside a specific text), but It helped me. I got from your regex `([^\n"]+)` and replaced with `(.*)` from mine, which result `[^\n"]+)".*>My Text<\/a>`. Thank you! – KunLun Oct 11 '19 at 14:08
You're welcome - good luck with your code. – Nick Reed Oct 11 '19 at 14:09

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 11 '19 at 14:04

You can use this regex to locate the link inside the href attribute :

Regex :

<a .*? `href="(.*?)"`.*?>(?>.*?<\/a>)

Explanation :

.*? ==> anything with non-greedy markup

href="(.*?)" ==> the captured group

(?>.*?<\/a>) ==> loop-ahead for the closed tag

Demo : Here

Regex - extract href of html tag

2 Answers2