Question

This question shows my ignorance of regular expressions. I’ve never understood it quite enough.

If I wanted to match, for instance, just the URL portion of an tag in HTML, what would I need to do?

My regular expression to get the entire tag is:

<A[^>]*?HREF\s*=\s*[''']?([^''' >]+?)[ ''']?> 

I have no idea what I would need to do to get the URL out of that and I have no clue where to look in regular expression documentation to figure this out.

Answer 1

If programming in Perl you could utilize the $1 operator within an if() statement. For ex.

if( $HREF =~ /<A[^>]*?HREF\s*=\s*[''']?([^''' >]+?)[ ''']?>/ ) {  print $1; }