Question

I’m fooling around with Yahoo! pipes and I’m hitting a wall with some regular expression. Now I’m familiar with regular expressions from Perl but the rules just seem to be different in Yahoo! pipes.

What I’m doing is fetching a page and trying to turn it into a feed, my regex for stripping out the link from the HTML works fine but the title which I want to be what was in <i> tags just outputs the original text.

Sample text that matches in Perl and on this online regexp tester:

<a rel=’nofollow’ target=’_blank’ HREF=’http://changed.to/protect/the-guilty.html’><i>’Fee Fi Fo Fun’ (English Man)</i></a> (See also this other site <a rel=’nofollow’ target=’_blank’ href=’http://stackoverflow.com’>Nada</a&gt;) Some other text here

Answer 1

RegEx for the title:

(?i).*?<i>([^<]*).*               [ ] g  [x] s  [ ] m  [ ] i 

RegEx for the link:

(?i).*?href='([^']*).*            [ ] g  [x] s  [ ] m  [ ] i 

Somehow the case-insensitive checkbox seems broken. Luckily you can substitute with (?i), which works nicely.

Here is a nice web2.0-ish tool to test regular expressions with: RegExr. But for some reason it’s still beta. 😉