I have a HTML string and want to replace all links to just a text.
E.g. having
Some text <a href="http://google.com/">Google</a>.
need to get
Some text Google.
What regex should I use?
views:
99answers:
3
+2
A:
Several similar questions have been posted and the best practice is to use Html Agility Pack which is built specifically to achieve thing like this.
Fadrian Sudaman
2010-03-13 12:22:10
In second note, if you really need a regex solution, you can do this \<a href=.*?\>(?<text>.*?)\</a\> to extract the text and replace using the same regex string pattern, or simply replace \<a href=.*?\> and \</a\> with empty string
Fadrian Sudaman
2010-03-13 12:27:35
+1 this answer. `<a href=.*?>...` will fail even for simple, valid HTML. Allowing `.*?` is naïve even by the low, low standards of regex; for example a simple difference like the close-tag being `</a >` and you've just matched a big stretch of document across multiple links by mistake. Plus, of course, the hundred other constructs that'll trip this over. Do yourself a favour. Use an HTML parser. It's what they're there for.
bobince
2010-03-13 14:42:13
A:
I asked about simple regex (thanks Fabrian). The code will be the following:
var html = @"Some text <a href="http://google.com/">Google</a>.";
Regex r = new Regex(@"\<a href=.*?\>");
html = r.Replace(html, "");
r = new Regex(@"\</a\>");
html = r.Replace(html, "");
sashaeve
2010-03-13 12:49:32
Welcome. So I take it that this is what you wanted then? If you please accept the answer so not wasting other time to post more answers
Fadrian Sudaman
2010-03-13 12:56:47
this doesn't handle the case where the tag has a different attribute (i.e. title) before href. See my answer below.
Andrew Theken
2010-03-13 13:56:57
+1
A:
var html = "<a ....>some text</a>";
var ripper = new Regex("<a.*?>(?<anchortext>.*?)</a>", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
html = ripper.Match(html).Groups["anchortext"].Value;
//html = "some text"
Andrew Theken
2010-03-13 13:55:29