Regex Question

[Chris M 55]

I have a complex regex that I need to filter out urls from a string that look like this:

<h3 class="r"><a href="http://thaitopsites.com/" onmousedown="return rwt(this,'','','','1','AFQjCNHylaxMZzDrzrnNGQB4aFI39nOWBQ','','0CCoQFjAA','','',event)">thaitopsites.com/</a></h3>

This is from scraping Google. How can I isolate just the ending url just before the closing </a> tag?

[Code Docta (Nick C.) 638]

(?=ABC)      - Positive lookahead. Matches a group after your main expression without including it in the result.
 
(?!ABC)      - Negative lookahead. Specifies a group that can not match after your main expression (ie. if it matches, the result is discarded).
 
(?<=ABC)     - Positive lookbehind. Matches a group before your main expression without including it in the result.
 
(?<!ABC)     - Negative lookbehind. Specifies a group that can not match before your main expression (ie. if it matches, the result is discarded).
 
(?<=ABC).*?(?=ABC) - Extracts the text between specified groups.

 

 

Where ABC is what you want to change. In other words pretend ABC is not there.

 

(?<=event\)">).*?(?=</a></h3>)

I escaped the ) after event and the blue is the surrounding strings.

 

http://regexhero.net/videos/

great tuts short and sweet.

 

HTH,

TC

[Code Docta (Nick C.) 638]

The surrounding string obviously must be unique to the URL you want.

[Chris M 55]

Thanks man! I added (?<=event\)">).*?(?=/</a></h3>) from you example and it's perfect now

[peleus 2]

Nice to see this working already. I'm also going to try this out as I'm looking to set up something like this.