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Help with regex

Answer 1

+3 A:

This will capture everything within the quotes for only levelFirstItem=2:

/href="([^"]*levelFirstItem=2)"/

Gavin Miller 2009-07-17 16:08:58

there are more than one hrefs ... i want a particular one

n00ki3 2009-07-17 16:13:58

How can you distinguish the one you want?

Draemon 2009-07-17 16:15:11

levelFirstItem=2

n00ki3 2009-07-17 16:18:05

...at the end of the href

n00ki3 2009-07-17 16:18:36

@n00ki3 - In your question, you need to distinguish better what you're looking for. As you can see, no one noticed that you were wanting just levelFirstItem=2.

Gavin Miller 2009-07-17 16:32:13

well .. in my question i said that i want to extract only this line .. and the session is variable..IT WORKD!.THANKS..next time i will be more explicit :)

n00ki3 2009-07-17 16:35:10

Answer 2

+3 A:

In general, it's better to find an HTML library that will allow you to grab information from HTML. Using regular expressions will get very messy quickly.

What language are you using? I'm sure people here can direct you to a good HTML parsing library for any popular language.

cgyDeveloper 2009-07-17 16:09:54

Given the java tag, I assume java :)

Yacoby 2009-07-17 16:13:58

What, so you'd parse an entire HTML file just to get at one attribute? I agree that often regexes are abused where real parsers should be used, but without more context, regexes may well be the right tool if the conditions are fairly restrained.

Draemon 2009-07-17 16:21:20

D'oh. Not sure how I missed that with 'jsessionid' staring me in the face :)I could help for Ruby, C# or C++, but Java isn't my domain.Anybody have a good recommendation?

cgyDeveloper 2009-07-17 16:23:55

@Draemon - You are right, it probably needs more context. But, in my experience, if you're parsing one line of HTML you're probably going to be parsing many. A lot of people just default to RegEx when it's not actually ideal.

cgyDeveloper 2009-07-17 16:25:57

Answer 3

A:

/href="([^"]*)"/

and in Java:

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("href=\"([^\"]*)\"");
Matcher m = p.matcher(line);
if(m.matches()) {
    String href = m.group(1);
}

Draemon 2009-07-17 16:10:00

Answer 4

A:

or possibly /href="(.*?)"/ assuming the regexp engine you're using negates greedy with ?.

bic72 2009-07-17 16:12:40

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