regEx - regExp | tag - with other tag between

Question

I'm searching to match all the content between 2 tag <a and </a>

My page is always the same,

<a class="applink" href="myLINK" target="..." onClick="..."><img src="..." border="0" alt="..." title="..." align=bottom hspace=3 width="32" height="32"><br>xxxxx</br></a>

A would like match all part of html code where code like this.

so <a class="applink" [...] </a> (!!!! with the tag <img for example --> no [^>]*)

possible duplicate of [RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags) — annakata, Dec 22 '10 at 13:09
just a small markup note, `
xxxx` is not correct. A line break must always be like this: `
` — Dan, Dec 22 '10 at 13:13
@annakata - This isn't a duplicate in any way, but I'm sympathetic to your passion. `:)` — Kobi, Dec 22 '10 at 14:14
@annakata [Obligatory link](http://stackoverflow.com/q/4231382/471272): please link to actual answers, not to non-answers. — tchrist, Jun 08 '14 at 20:11

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 22 '10 at 14:02

2

A better approach here is to use an HTML parser. For example, the Html Agility Pack:

HtmlWeb web = new HtmlWeb();
HtmlDocument doc = web.Load("http://jsbin.com/enico4/"); // this works!
HtmlNodeCollection links = doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//a[@class='appLink']");

You can also get each link's HTML if you need it, but links is already the collection you need.

IEnumerable<string> appLinks = links.Select(link => link.InnerHtml);

(the code here is C#, but it should translate easily to VB.Net)

answered Dec 22 '10 at 14:02

Kobi

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Thank for you approach. Problem is that if a work with a webBrowser, i can't or i don't know how, joins my httprequest whith this webBrowser because cookies is loss and so WebBrowser ask again an authentification. Bue Thanks for your solution. I have well try an XML parser, but the page is not valid so i have many error :( – yrejk Dec 22 '10 at 14:36
@yrejk - I'm not sure I understand. You already have the HTML, don't you? You use the regex on it. The Agility Pack can take HTML from a string, you don't have to load it from a browser or a web request. – Kobi Dec 22 '10 at 15:18
@yrejk The point here is that you may instantiate the `HtmlDocument` with an HTML *string*, you do not even need to fetch the data from the Web again after you get the HTML data with your WebBrowser. – Wiktor Stribiżew Oct 13 '17 at 08:31

Jason · Accepted Answer · 2010-12-22T13:41:05.243

1

HTML parsing is a bit tricky with regex, but this should work for many cases:

<a\s.*?href\s*=\s*"appLink"[^>]*>(.|\s)*?</a>

This will match elements with an href="appLink".

You might want to consider using the .NET XML parsing code.

edited Dec 22 '10 at 13:41

answered Dec 22 '10 at 13:09

Jason

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I want all the tag A with class="appLink" so if it's i want also the tag... And can you give me some info about XML parser class ? – yrejk Dec 22 '10 at 13:27
i have remote "new_line" so with ']+>(.*?)' it's ok... But i i want perform this to have only ...href="appl... or ...href="laun... ! Greats – yrejk Dec 22 '10 at 13:52

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 22 '10 at 13:10

0

This should solve it for you: <a .*?</a>

This does NOT affect tags like <address>, <abbr>, ...

answered Dec 22 '10 at 13:10

sjngm

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score -1 · Answer 4 · answered Dec 22 '10 at 13:10

-1

<a.*</a>

OR

<a class="applink".*</a>

answered Dec 22 '10 at 13:10

Francis

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regEx - regExp | tag - with other tag between

4 Answers4