CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regex
Roy
Roy

Reputation: 3267

How come this regex isn't working?

I am using: 

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

And I'm trying to find the value under these paremeters:

     <a href="/lyrics/anything.html">This is what I need</a>

I need to find the "This is what I need" but the "anything" changes depending on the link. I don't want to find the text inside all the 'a' tags but, only ones of which have are inside the lyrics folder. I can't see why this currently isn't working? I'm awful at explaining but thanks in advance. Oh and I understand regex perhaps isn't the best method but, I really want to look into it.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 67

Answers (3)

Oded
Oded

Reputation: 499002

You are escaping \\ instead of using / (it is /lyrics/ not \lyrics\.

Additionally, \\* will match 0 or more \ characters, when you should be matching on any character that is not ".

The following will do:

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

Upvotes: 2

Bradley M Handy
Bradley M Handy

Reputation: 613

Depends on which RegEx engine you're using. Given a Perl or Java engine here's what I see wrong.

\b is unnecessary

\\lyrics\\* should be /lyrics/.* (if Perl, then you'll need to escape the / as well.)

Upvotes: 0

JohnLBevan
JohnLBevan

Reputation: 24410

Your slashes are the wrong way around (i.e. those which make up the path) and you're missing a dot before the *:

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

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions