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bfsog · July 29 '08, 06:43 AM (#1)

I can throw together some regular expressions that extract dates and other easy stuff but this is pretty taxing, for me anway.

Lets say I have the following HTML

HTML Code:

<ul>
	<li><a href="file1.html" title="This is a title for file1">file 1</a></li>
	<li><a href="banana.html" title="">Banana</a></li>
	<li><a href="tg.html">tg</a></li>
	<li><a href="bfsog.html" id="bfsog" title="biffy">biffy</a></li>
</ul>

I want the href and the link text. I have come up with

Code:

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

To be honest I am not sure if that actually works, I have been ducking between doing this in PHP and C# (A php RE will not work in a C# app I do not think).

So in short, from the above example I would like something like

Quote:

file1.html file1
banana.html Banana
tg.html tg
bfsog.html biffy

Thanks in advance

**filburt1** · July 29 '08, 09:25 AM (#2)

<a.*?href\s*=\s*["'](.*?)['"].*?>(.*?)</a>

Untested but I think will work.

bfsog · July 29 '08, 09:53 AM (#3)

It probably is me more than your code, but I cannot seem to get that to work, parse errors and what not.

It's annoying though, in a C# app I can extract the href="" value but the RE that I use cannot be used in PHP, and vice versa.

**filburt1** · July 29 '08, 10:48 AM (#4)

The error specifically?

If you're using it inside preg_match, prefix it with / and postfix it with /i

bfsog · July 29 '08, 10:58 AM (#5)

Using inside preg_match_all.

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING

However I am fed up now, I think I shall invest in some RE books.

**filburt1** · July 29 '08, 11:17 AM (#6)

Oh, well escape either the ' or the ", depending on what quotes you're using to surround the regex itself.

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Regex to return <a href> attributes