Question

I’m new to Regex and i need to parse sourcecode from a website. Can anyone tell me what would be the syntax to match a word followed by the next n characters in the string.

Let’s say I wanna match word “country” followed by the next 15 chars in the string.

If string would be “…<tr class=”hover”><td>country</td><td>RO</td></t……” I need to get “country</td><td>RO” , I can deal with the string like this , ideally would be only “country RO ” but I don’t wanna ask for too much.

Answer 1

Something like: (country)<\/td><td>(\.\.)

Using $1 $2 as your output should give you what you need.

Explaination:

1. Putting the () brackets around something lets you back reference it with the $1, etc.
2. Otherwise you are able to match exact characters.
3. Note to escape special regex chars like / with a backslash
4. The second match in brackets is just matching the next two characters no matter what they are. If you have a subset these can be (i.e. [A-Za-z]) it would be better to use that

With that assumption I would use something like: (country)<\/td><td>([A-za-z]{2})

Also helps to find a good reference: http://www.regular-expressions.info/reference.html