regex letter grouping?

Question

Extract text from URL ?

trying this preg_match

/\<a href=([^"]*) .?\>([^\<\/a]*)\<\/a\>+/

Not working on

<a href="_first.asp?FileName=37479676820111216064143">        
<font size="2" face="Tahoma">
TEXT I WANT TO EXTRACT
</font>
</a>

am sure there's something wrong with ([^\<\/a]*) am just too bad in regex and can't find a good tutorial even !

Added `php` tag because there are a **lot** of dialects of regular expressions. But as you're using `preg_match`, we can assume PHP's dialect. — T.J. Crowder, Dec 17 '11 at 12:12

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:11

0

In the very start, you have href=, then any number of non-quotes (which is zero in your example, since the next character is a quote), and then a space (which fails your expression, since the next character is not a quote, but a space).

In any case, while this is doable with regexps as long as the structure doesn't change, it's not really the way to do it.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:11

Community

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answered Dec 17 '11 at 12:20

Amadan

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 17 '11 at 12:22

0

Maybe:

/^<a[^>]+>(?:\s*<[^>]+>)*\s*([^<]+)(?:\s*<\/[^>]+>)*\s*<\/a>$/m

will work?

answered Dec 17 '11 at 12:22

fge

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regex letter grouping?

2 Answers2