ASP pattern matching

[shakes911]

Does anyone have a pattern matching script to extract a HTML link, i.e. <a href=.....>link text</a> while retaining the link text?

thanks

[sugarkane]

Shakes, do you want to extract the URL from the link or just the link text?

I've been trying to get some info on how ASP deals with pattern matching, but with little success.

I can only find examples of using the 'islike' function, where it returns true or false for a matched pattern - do you know if it supports substitution etc?

[shakes911]

I only wish to retain the actual link text and rid myself of the URL. I found this script on 4guysfromrolla.com but it just doesn't seem to work for me no matter how i tweak it.

'Assume strHTML contains the HTML with the <a href="URL">URL Description</a>
'We want to store into strText the HTML in strHTML, but with the HREF tags
'changed to a more text-friendly URL Description [URL]

'First, create a reg exp object
Dim objRegExp
Set objRegExp = New RegExp

objRegExp.IgnoreCase = True
objRegExp.Global = True
objRegExp.Pattern = "<a\s+href=""http://(.*?)"">\s*((\n¦.)+?)\s*</a>"

'Now, replace the HREF tags with our preferred format
strText = objRegExp.Replace(strHTML, "$2 [http://$1]")

[shakes911]

I think you can use the '%' sign as a regular expression to symbolise any text of zero or more characters, like the * symbol in DOS.

[sugarkane]

A general regex would be <a\s+.*?>(.*?)</a\s*>

I don't have access to an ASP box, so I can't test this, but it looks like this should work:

objRegExp.Pattern = "<a\s+.*?>(.*?)</a\s*>"
strText = objRegExp.Replace(strHTML, "$1")

[shakes911]

thanks man.