Question

I have an string input-buffer that contains html.
That html contains a lot of text, including some stuff I want to parse.
What I’m actually looking for are the lines like this : “< strong>Filename< /strong>: yadayada.thisandthat.doc< /p>”

(Although position and amount of whitespace / semicolons is variable)

What’s the best way to get all the filenames into a List< string> ?

Answer 1

I’m not sure a regular expression is the best way to do this, traversing the HTML tree is probably more sensible, but the following regex should do it:

<\s*strong\s*>\s*Filename\s*<\s*/strong\s*>[\s:]*([^<]+)<\s*/p\s*>

As you can see, I’ve been extremely tolerant of whitespace, as well as tolerant on the content of the filename. Also, multiple (or no) semicolons are permitted.

The C# to build a List (off the top of my head):

List<String> fileNames = new List<String>();
Regex regexObj = new Regex(@"<\s*strong\s*>\s*Filename\s*<\s*/strong\s*>[\s:]*([^<]+)<\s*/p\s*>", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
    Match matchResults = regexObj.Match(subjectString);
    while (matchResults.Success) {

            fileNames.Add(matchResults.Groups[0].Value);

        matchResults = matchResults.NextMatch();
    }