Why does Regex.Match return only 1 result?

Question

I'm using a regex that strips the href tags out of an html doc saved to a string. The following code is how I'm using it in my C# console app.

Match m = Regex.Match(htmlSourceString, "href=[\\\"\\\'](http:\\/\\/|\\.\\/|\\/)?\\w+(\\.\\w+)*(\\/\\w+(\\.\\w+)?)*(\\/|\\?\\w*=\\w*(&\\w*=\\w*)*)?[\\\"\\\']");

        if (m.Success)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("values = " + m);
        }

However, it only returns one result, instead of a list of all the href tags on the html page. I know it works, because when I trying RegexOptions.RightToLeft, it returns the last href tag in the string.

Is there something with my if statement that doesn't allow me to return all the results?

Answer 1

Match method searches for the first occurence of the string, Matches method searches for all occurences.

Answer 2

If you use Match instead of Match**es** you need to use a loop to get all the matches calling m.NextMatch() at the end of each loop. For example:

    Match m = Regex.Match(htmlSourceString, "href=[\\\"\\\'](http:\\/\\/|\\.\\/|\\/)?\\w+(\\.\\w+)*(\\/\\w+(\\.\\w+)?)*(\\/|\\?\\w*=\\w*(&\\w*=\\w*)*)?[\\\"\\\']");
    Console.Write("values = ");
    while (m.Success) 
    { 
        Console.Write(m.Value);
        Console.Write(", "); // Delimiter
        m = m.NextMatch();
    }
    Console.WriteLine();