Regexp to simplify Yahoo Answers Feed Title

Question

Hello, I am trying to parse the yahoo answers feed - http://answers.yahoo.com/rss/allq The issue is that the titles have

[ Category ] : Open Question :

in every title that I do not want... I want to write a regexp to remove this...

anything that we can make to remove all the letters in the starting [ and the first : should do it.

there is a space after the : also, we need to remove that too.

Thanks for this in advance, I will also try to find a solution myself.

Answer 1

Hello,

the following regex should do the job:

^\[.*?: 

Usage sample in c#:

string resultString = Regex.Replace(subjectString, @"^\[.*?: ", "");

What it does is start with an [ bracket and take any characters until it matches a : and take the follwing space.

Hope this helps, Tom.

Thanks @ cmptrgeekken for pointing the non greedy thing out!

Answer 2

Have you considered using Yahoo's YQL service to parse this feed (or other web pages)?

• Querying html using Yahoo YQL
• Yahoo! Query Language
• YQL Console

They already have sample queries for you to get at Yahoo Answers data:

• answers.getbycategory: http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/#h=select%20*%20from%20answers.getbycategory%20where%20category_id%3D2115500137%20and%20type%3D%22resolved%22

• answers.getbyuser: http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/#h=select%20*%20from%20answers.getbyuser%20where%20user_id%3D%22YbaMGtHFaa%22

• answers.getquestion: http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/#h=select%20*%20from%20answers.getquestion%20where%20question_id%3D%2220090526102023AAkRbch%22

• answers.search: http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/#h=select%20*%20from%20answers.search%20where%20query%3D%22cars%22%20and%20category_id%3D2115500137%20and%20type%3D%22resolved%22

(Just an FYI in case you weren't aware of this convenient service. I use it instead of screen scraping with RegEx's.)