matching a string between special characters in JAVA

Question

I want to match n number of characters between a "<" and ">" characters. For example, I want to be able to match <a href = "image1.jpg"> or <a href = " http://www.learnmore.com/> essentially with the same pattern. This is because, the strings I receive might have n number of characters between the special characters. Once I match the pattern which includes the special characters, I will replace it with a blank space(which I am able to do currently---the replacing part.). I need help with the matching part only.

what have you done so far? can you post it so we can see it? — Hunter McMillen, Jul 14 '11 at 18:45
\"[^\"]* might work, but parsing HTML with regexp is not robust — Jochen Bedersdorfer, Jul 14 '11 at 18:49

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:55

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Obligatory "don't try to parse HTML with regex" link

edited May 23 '17 at 11:55

Community

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answered Jul 14 '11 at 18:52

Phil Miller

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 14 '11 at 18:46

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You can try the following regular expression

(&lt;|<)(.*?)(&gt;|>)

to match against your string (assuming the > was not a formatting error in your question but the actual content in the string).

answered Jul 14 '11 at 18:46

Howard

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I am trying to replace HTML tags with a blank space. If I hard code the HTML tag, I can replace and get the tag, but I am trying to match any tag and so the question on the forum. @Howard, I tried your expression, but it did not work. The > was a formatting error. It should be < or >. – Raghu Jul 14 '11 at 19:04

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 14 '11 at 18:46

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First replace > with > and < with <. Then do your pattern matching as usual using regex or whatever.

answered Jul 14 '11 at 18:46

tskuzzy

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matching a string between special characters in JAVA

3 Answers3