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Asked: 2026-05-20T14:44:42+00:00

There is a lot of argument back and forth over when and if it

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There is a lot of argument back and forth over when and if it is ever appropriate to use a regex to parse html.

As a common problem that comes up is parsing links from html my question is, would using a regex be appropriate if all you were looking for was the href value of <a> tags in a block of HTML? In this scenario you are not concerned about closing tags and you have a pretty specific structure you are looking for.

It seems like significant overkill to use a full html parser. While I have seen questions and answers indicating the using a regex to parse URLs, while largely safe is not perfect, the extra limitations of structured <a> tags would appear to provide a context where one should be able to achieve 100% accuracy without breaking a sweat.

Thoughts?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Consider this valid html:

    <!DOCTYPE html>
<title>Test Case</title>
<p>
<!-- <a href="url1"> -->
<span class="><a href='url2'>"></span>
<a href='my">url<'>click</a>
</p>

    What is the list of urls to be extracted? A parser would say just a single url with value my">url<. Would your regular expression?

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