Question

I am using this regex to get all image urls in an html file:

(?<=img\s*\S*src\=[\x27\x22])(?<Url>[^\x27\x22]*)(?=[\x27\x22])

Is there any way to modify this regex to exclude any img tags that are commented out with html comment “”?

Answer 1

If your regex already works for extracting images (which would be a miracle in itself), consider a regex to strip HTML comments, like so:

<!--.*?-->

Replace that with an empty string, and any images inside the comment will no longer show up in your other regex.

Alternatively, if you’re using PHP (you didn’t tag a programming language), you can use the strip_tags function with "<img>" as the “allowable tags” parameter. This will strip out HTML comments, as well as other tags that may interfere with your regex.