Question

I want to grab the text between html tags using Dreamweaver’s search and replace tool.

The link format is a standard a tag e.g.

<a href="http://alink.com">Text</a>

Or:

<a href="http://alink.com">Text</a> and <a href="http://alink2.com">Text 2</a>

Or:

<a href="http://alink.com" target="_blank">Text</a>

I am using the following expression:

<a href="(.*)">(.*)</a>

This works fine for example 1, but it picks up everything between the first opening tag <a href and the last closing tag </a> in the case of example 2.

What can I do to just targeting each individual link?

Also, what can I do in the case of example 3 where links also have a target="_blank" property?

Answer 1

if you just want the “Text” in the body of the tag

<a[^>]*>([^<]*)</a>

would work

if you also want the href

<a[^>]*href="([^>"]*)"[^>]*>([^<]*)</a>