Do not match if within tag

Question

I have this regex which detects url formatted text:

/(http|ftp)+(s)?:(\/\/)((\w|\.)+)(\/)?(\S+)?/

so it would detect something like http://google.com

My problem is that I do not want it to detect the links when the links are inside tags such as <a href="http://google.com">http://www.google.com</a> - so in there it should not detect anything. Help?

EDIT - I do NOT want to match the anchor tag. The above regex matches links inside anchor tags which is what I do not want. I need it to match links only outside of tags.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags — knittl, Sep 28 '11 at 17:38

genesis · Answer 1 · 2011-09-28T17:49:01.703

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this one should work

/(?!href.*?=.*?['"]+)(http|ftp)+(s)?:(\/\/)((\w|\.)+)(\/)?(\S+)?/

edited Sep 28 '11 at 17:49

answered Sep 28 '11 at 17:37

genesis

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This regex is matching the opposite of what I want. This is matching the anchor tag and the link – user969622 Sep 28 '11 at 17:41
@user969622: no, ?! ensures it's not there – genesis Sep 28 '11 at 17:49
@user969622, maybe you are matching against the opposite of what you want therefore you are getting the opposite match of what you want for the opposite target. bam, double negative! – Tyler Crompton Sep 28 '11 at 18:02
@TylerCrompton: - minus - = plus – genesis Sep 28 '11 at 18:11
Your expression matches exactly the same set of strings as the OPs expression, since your lookahead can never match when the rest of the expression does. – Paul Sep 28 '11 at 18:44

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Dec 15 '11 at 03:34

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/(?<!href=['"])(http|ftp)+(s)?:(\/\/)((\w|\.)+)(\/)?(\S+)?/

edited Dec 15 '11 at 03:34

animuson

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answered Sep 28 '11 at 18:43

Paul

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Hmm after some usage it stopped functioning in some cases such as ` http://www.test.com/` If two alike links are present it matches both of them. How can this be fixed? – user969622 Sep 29 '11 at 00:46

Do not match if within tag

2 Answers2