Question

I need to strip this string <a class=BC_ANCHOR href="http://www.msn.com" onClick=something target=_blank>MSN</a> into <a href="http://www.msn.com">MSN</a> – however this Regex \s+\w+[^href]=\S*\w? won’t stop at the closing > but rather runs to the end of the </a> – can someone please assist me in getting this Regex to stop at that closing >?

Thanks!

Answer 1

By putting \w+[^href] you still allow things like <a href ="... and can exclude tags ending in h, r, e, or f (that aren’t necessarily href).

Try

\s+(?!href)[a-zA-Z+]+ *= *(?:"[^"]+"|\w+)

Explanation: The (?!href) is a negative lookahead and prevents the tag from being href.

The [a-zA-Z]+ is your tag. There are spaces allowed before and after the ‘=’. I restricted to letters, because I’m pretty sure attribute names can’t include numbers or underscores (which \w will allow).

The (?:"[^"]+"|\w+) means that the value of the tag can be anything within double-quotes, OR a non-quoted set of \w+.

These all prevent the match from going outside the >, unless your regex is malformed and you have (e.g.) <a name="asdf> (note the missing closing ").