Question need help building regex (regular expression)

[andyvl]

ok, For the moment I have a string() where each element is in the structure of

" class="odd"><td class="hs"><a href="http://resume.imdb.com/" onClick="(new Image()).src='/rg/title-tease/resumehead/images/b.gif?link=http://resume.imdb.com/';"><img src="http://i.media-imdb.com/images/tn15/addtiny.gif" width="25" height="31" border="0"></td><td class="nm"><a href="/name/nm0926013/">Leonard Whiting</a></td><td class="ddd"> ... </td><td class="char"><a href="/character/ch0000491/">Romeo</a></td></tr>"

For this example I need to get the values
Leonard Whiting
and
Romeo

Is this doable via reg. expr?
please note that the a href="\name\nm0926013 and the a href="\character\ch0000491
are no consant values.

Which is the best way to get this data out of this string?
I'm playing with the regex for about 4hours now and I just can't get it.
Any help will be more then welcome

 

[MattP]

You'll need to do some string cleanup to take care of quotes in your input string. This seems to work for me.

		Dim content As String = "<a href=""/name/nm0926013/"">Leonard Whiting</a></td><td class=""ddd""> ..." & _
		 "</td><td class=""char""><a href=""/character/ch0000491/"">Romeo</a></td></tr>"

		Dim match As New Regex("<a[^>]*>(?'tagtext'.*?)</a>")

		For Each m As Match In match.Matches(content)
			MessageBox.Show(m.Groups("tagtext").Value)
		Next

 

[cjard]

You'll need to do some string cleanup to take care of quotes in your input string. This seems to work for me.

		Dim content As String = "<a href=""/name/nm0926013/"">Leonard Whiting</a></td><td class=""ddd""> ..." & _
		 "</td><td class=""char""><a href=""/character/ch0000491/"">Romeo</a></td></tr>"

		Dim match As New Regex("<a[^>]*>(?'tagtext'.*?)</a>")

		For Each m As Match In match.Matches(content)
			MessageBox.Show(m.Groups("tagtext").Value)
		Next

The only two things I'd be mindful of in this case are that the strings in a tag attributes might contain a >, and that I wouldnt use the greedy search because it works back from the end of a string trying to match as much sa possible. A pessimistic search for the end of the tag may perform better.