Question

I have a string of text that contains html, and I need to extract each url (most likely in img or a tags) to create a generic list of string objects. I only want the urls from inside html tags, not in the text. Is there an easy way to do this or will I have to resort to regular expressions?

If I have to resort to regular expressions, would you mind helping me out with that as well? 🙂

UPDATE:
To answer Seph, the input will be standard html.

<p>This is some html text.  my favourite website is <a href="http://www.google.com">google</a> and my favourite help site is <a href="http://www.stackoverflow.com">stackoverflow</a> and i check my email at <a href="http://www.gmail.com">gmail</a>.  the url to my site is http://www.example.com.   <img src="http://www.example.com/someimage.jpg" alt=""/></p>

And I want

• http://www.google.com
• http://www.stackoverflow.com
• http://www.gmail.com
• http://www.example.com/someimage.jpg

the end result should be All urls in any html tag, ignoring those are are "plain text"

UPPERDATE
Although he deleted his answer, I want to thank Jerry Bullard for bringing to my attention
Regex Buddy (http://www.regexbuddy). I wanted to upvote your answer but its gone. Bring it back and you get a vote!

Answer 1

Something like this should help:

    private List<string> GetUrlStrings(string text)
    {
        List<string> listURL = new List<string>();
        Regex regex = new Regex("href\\s*=\\s*(?:(?:\\\"(?<url>[^\\\"]*)\\\")|(?<url>[^\\s]* ))");
        MatchCollection mathColl = regex.Matches(text);

        foreach (Match match in mathColl)
        {
            foreach (Group group in match.Groups)
            {
                if (!group.Value.StartsWith("href")) // workaround regex issue
                {
                    listURL.Add(group.Value);
                }
            }
        }
        return listURL;
    }