Regex to match the content of img src within div

Question

I m new on this field so i don't have much idea about regex. My problem is like this I have a "div" within it their is a "href" attribute and finally their is "img". I want a regex to match the "img" source content by which i can get the data of that content if the url of that particular content matches.

<div class="test_list3">
   <a href="/photo/tst_t_45288/6782/12/1/">`<img  src="http://example.com/1700/tst_t_45288/m2/tst_t_45288_1.jpg" title="tst-t  1" alt="tst-t 1" /></a><br /><a href="http://example.com/1700/tst_t_45288/tst_t_45288_1.jpg"  target="_blank">jpg file</a>
</div>

Any suggestions ?

Use an XML parser. HTML is not a regular language and so regex should not be used with it. — Millie Smith, Oct 22 '13 at 06:13
@MillieSmith - on the other hand, HTML (in most of its forms) isn't XML so an XML parser may also choke on it. An HTML parser, on the other hand, would be quite suitable. — Damien_The_Unbeliever, Oct 22 '13 at 06:20
In what context are you gonning to execute your regex on the html? I mean is it a java program? or what? — mostafa.S, Oct 22 '13 at 06:21
Hm. Thanks for pointing that out @Damien_The_Unbeliever. For some reason I thought HTML was a subset — Millie Smith, Oct 22 '13 at 06:31
@MillieSmith - no, HTML has void elements (e.g. `
` and ``) which shouldn't, properly, have closing tags. — Damien_The_Unbeliever, Oct 22 '13 at 06:40
why `regexp`???? why not `xpath'? could give the full html structure? — Dmitry Zagorulkin, Oct 22 '13 at 07:54

revo · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-22T17:54:16.593

If using a regex is your last choice, you can go with this:

(?s)<div[^>]*>.*<img.*src=\"([^"]+)\".*<\/div>

Live demo

Explanation

because you have multiple lines s flag needed to make dot matches newlines.
then checking for opening div tag and all its attributes by <div[^>]*>
- [^>]* zero or more characters but not >
then we should match all other things till we reach to opening img tag by .*
after that we should go through possibly attributes or spaces before src attribute here <img.*src
then capturing all characters except " in src : src=\"([^"]+)
and finally escape all things till first occurrence of closing div tag happens

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 22 '13 at 08:37

I think I cannot do this by only one reg exp

1.Using <div[^>]*>[^<>]*(((?'Open'<div[^>]*>)[^<>]*)+((?'-Open'</div>)[^<>]*)+)*(?(Open)(?!))</div> get the content between two div tags.

2.Using other reg exp matchs the matching string in step1 and get the content between the img tags.

Regex to match the content of img src within div

2 Answers2