In JMeter how can I capture multiple (varying) values of a regular expression?

Question

I need to parse a html page that can contain multiple (unspecified how many) links. Here an example (pseudo html):

<a href="../entrygroups/GROUPIDENTIFIER/3">edit</a>
[...]
<a href="../entrygroups/GROUPIDENTIFIER/7">edit</a>
[...]
<a href="../entrygroups/GROUPIDENTIFIER/12">edit</a>
[...]
<a href="../entrygroups/GROUPIDENTIFIER/16">edit</a>

I am basically just interested in the numbers 3,7,12,16 of the url.

Is there a way to put those values into some sort of array and loop over them (in a for each kind of way).

Is this possible and if so, how would I do this? I looked at the regular expression extractor but it seems that that one can only assign a fixed set of groups to a fixed set of variables.

Answer 1

1. Extract the values using Regular Expression Extractor configured like:

   • Reference Name: anything meaningful, i.e. edit
   • Regular Expression: <a href="../entrygroups/GROUPIDENTIFIER/(.+?)">edit</a>
   • Template: $1

   • Match No: -1

     

2. Add ForEach Controller configured like:

   • Input variable prefix: edit (or whatever you used as the Regular Expression Extractor Reference Name)

   • Output variable prefix: again anything meaningful, i.e. current_edit

     

3. Put the sampler(s) you need under the ForEach Controller

4. Refer the "GROUPIDENTIFIER" value as ${current_edit} where required

   

See Using Regular Expressions in JMeter guide for another example of looping through all links found in the page with the Regular Expression Extractor and ForEach Controller.

Answer 2

Actually RegEx extractor is able to do exactly what you want, if you specify Match No. field with less than 0, e.g. -1:

As a result, you will get N variables (using your input as example):

id_1=3
id_2=7
id_3=12
id_4=16

There also will be variable which has a count of matches:

id_matchNr=4