Question

in my project i want to retrieve tags from a web page for that i used dom methods.

But tags can be created dynamically like document.write(“<a href=”http://somedomain.com”>”);

here tags are given in the format of a string so i am trying to use regular expressions.

I want a regular expression which matches all the tags and attributes provided the expression should be able to extract specific attribute also

Answer 1

It is very hard to understand what you are asking and it is very unclear.

First off: never use regex to parse HTML if you have an option. It looks simple right? No. You’ll find a problem sooner or later.

Second: what David said.

Now here’s a regex to match any HTML tag (have not tested it or anything so try it out first if you must):

\<[^>]*\>

Be warned it will match a script tag too (do not let users write any tag to your page, whitelist a few if you must, and be prepared to have trouble if you don’t use a library).

Try these out at RegExr for example (but remind that it uses ActionScript regexes, may be different from Javascript ones sometimes, for example Javascript has no lookahead/lookbehind.