Question

I’m trying to get an HTML source code meta tag “name” attribute value in a single regular expression. Is this possible?
Right now I’m running a regular expression to get all meta tags:

"<meta.*?>"

I’m storing all matches into a List<String>, and then I run a second regular expression on those results to get the “name” attribute value:

"name=\".*?\""

Is there a way of doing this with a single regular expression? I just want to store the “name” attribute ONLY of meta tags, ignoring other HTML tags.

Thanks!

Answer 1

List<String> matchList = new ArrayList<String>();
try {
    Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("(?<=<meta).*?name\\s*=\\s*\"(.*)\"");
    Matcher regexMatcher = regex.matcher(subjectString);
    while (regexMatcher.find()) {
        matchList.add(regexMatcher.group(1));
    } 
} catch (PatternSyntaxException ex) {
    // Syntax error in the regular expression
}

Your list (matchList ) in the end should contain the desired result which will be the values of all name attributes.

Finally as you will see in all posts related with xml/html and regexes the norm is to go for a parser instead of a regex. However if you task is so simple you can do it with a regex easily.