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RegEx: Find quotes within a tag

Answer 1

A:

Try this: <span class="([^"]+?)?">

Dario 2009-05-13 12:24:39

Answer 2

A:

This should get your the first attribute value in a tag:

<[^">]+"(?<value>[^"]*)"[^>]*>

matthewthurlow 2009-05-13 12:26:20

Answer 3

A:

If your intention is to replace ALL quotation marks within tags, you could use the following regular expression:

(<[^>"]*)(")([^>]*>)

That will isolate the substrings before and after your quotation mark. Note that this does not attempt to match opening and closing quotation marks. It simply matches a quotation mark within a tag.

Krsna 2009-05-13 12:39:01

Yes, my intention is to replace all quotation marks within tags. Do I have to loop through all submatches then?

2009-05-13 13:31:22

So, are you able to use Regex.Replace? http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xwewhkd1.aspx

Krsna 2009-05-13 13:51:48

Yes, I'd use the replace function. But I don't know how to use it with the pattern. It doesn't find the quotes within a tag.

2009-05-14 09:03:40

Answer 4

+3 A:

It depends on your regex flavor, but this works for most of them:

"(?=[^<]*>)

EDIT: For anyone curious how this works. This translates into English as "Find a quote that is followed by a > before the next <".

Nick Whaley 2009-05-13 13:02:50

Thanks, this works great with VB.

2009-05-13 14:00:35

Note that the plain `>` character is allowed in attribute values.

Gumbo 2009-05-13 14:10:39

@Gumbo Interesting note but the '>' character will not be a problem if it appears in an attribute. The '<' character however will be.

Nick Whaley 2009-05-13 14:43:32

@Nick The pattern has problems, if the string looks like: This "is" > great! How can we improve it?

2009-05-14 07:27:43

@Moo, the '>' character is not valid have between tags. It needs to be escaped as '>'. But if you need to be that picky, you need to get a real HTML parser.

Nick Whaley 2009-05-14 14:53:09

Answer 5

+2 A:

Regexes are fundamentally bad at parsing HTML (see Can you provide some examples of why it is hard to parse XML and HTML with a regex? for why). What you need is an HTML parser. See Can you provide an example of parsing HTML with your favorite parser? for examples using a variety of parsers.

If you are using VB.net you should be able to use HTMLAgilityPack.

Chas. Owens 2009-05-13 14:08:03

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RegEx: Find quotes within a tag

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