Question

<a href="?action=add&question=149&cat=88">Answer</a>'

this is the url i needed to get href value i cannot use element.getAttribute. I cannot use dom parsing.
But if i try to parse it using search mechanism

td3_element = <td valign="top">
<a href="?action=add&question=149&cat=88">Answer</a>
</td>

href_start = td3_element.search("<a href=") + 8;
td3_part   = td3_element.substring(href_start);
href_end   = td3_part.search(">Answer</a>");
href_element = td3_part.substring(0,href_end);

href_element will only be till `?action=addamp`  

it is taking the

;

character coming after amp as end of line and it is terminating search to that point. Can some one tell me a solution which will give the desired href without using DOM parser

Answer 1

Have you tried a regular expression? I’m not sure what you mean just by ‘search mechanism’.

For example:

var htmlString = 'td3...(etc)';
var regex = /href="([^"])"/;
var hrefUrl = regex.exec()[1];
console.log(hrefUrl); //?action=add&question=149&cat=88 

See also this jsfiddle