Question

I have so far this:

<a href="(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt\d{7}/)".*?>.*?</a>

c#

ArrayList imdbUrls = matchAll(@"<a href=""(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt\d{7}/)"".*?>.*?</a>", html);
private ArrayList matchAll(string regex, string html, int i = 0)
{
  ArrayList list = new ArrayList();
  foreach (Match m in new Regex(regex, RegexOptions.Multiline).Matches(html))
    list.Add(m.Groups[i].Value.Trim());
  return list;
}

I’m trying to extract imdb link from an HTML page
what is wrong with this regex expression?

The main idea of this is to search in google for a movie and then look for a link to imdb in the results

Answer 1

Regex is not a good choice for parsing HTML files.HTML is not strict nor is it regular with its format.

Use htmlagilitypack.You can use this code to retrieve it using HtmlAgilityPack

HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlDocument();
doc.Load(yourStream);

List<string> anchorImdbList = doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//a[@href]")//this xpath selects all anchor tags
                  .Select(p => p.Attributes["href"].Value)
                  .Where(x=>Regex.IsMatch(x,@".*?www\.imdb\.com.*?"))
                  .Select(y=>y)
                  .ToList<string>();