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Asked: 2026-05-13T12:47:00+00:00

So i’m looking to scrape rapidshare.com links from websites. I have the following regular

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So i’m looking to scrape rapidshare.com links from websites. I have the following regular expressions to find links:

<a href=\"(http://rapidshare.com/files/(\\d+)/(.+)\\.(\\w{3,4}))\"

http://rapidshare.com/files/(\\d+)/(.+)\\.(\\w{3,4})

How can I write a regex that will exclude text that is embedded in a <a href="..."> tag. and only capture the text in >here</a>

I also have to bare in mind that not all links are embedded in href tags. Some are just displayed in plain text.

Basically is there a wway to exclude patterns in regex ?

Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    To capture the inner text of an anchor tag, while ignoring all attribute text of the tag, you’d use the pattern:

    <a href="http://rapidshare.com/files/(\d+)/(.+)\.(\w{3,4})[^>]*>(.*?)</a>

    The [^>]* part matches everything else in your tag up until the end of the start tag.
    The (.*?) performs a non-greedy capture of the inner text.

    If you want to capture anchor tag links and non-anchor tag links, then those are really two separate problems. There’s probably a regex for it, but it would be terribly complicated. You’re better off simply looking for non-anchor-tag links separately with the simple regex:

    [^'"]http://rapidshare.com/files/(\d+)/(.+)\.(\w{3,4})
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