regular expression in ios to remove href links

Question

i need some help in building a regular expression to remove href links with search terms from a long string that i then parse into a web view

an example of the href string : <a href="/search/?search=Huntington">Huntington</a>

i would like to remove everthing but the plain text of the link (just the link itself) but having troubles

 NSRegularExpression *regex = [NSRegularExpression regularExpressionWithPattern:@"<a href=\"/search/?search=([A-Z][a-z])\"" options:NSRegularExpressionCaseInsensitive error:&error];

any help would be greatly welcomed

Thanks

score 10 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 26 '12 at 08:30

10

I think

NSRegularExpression *regex = [NSRegularExpression regularExpressionWithPattern:@"<a href=\"[^\"]+\">([^<]+)</a>" options:NSRegularExpressionCaseInsensitive error:&error];
NSString *modifiedString = [regex stringByReplacingMatchesInString:string options:0 range:NSMakeRange(0, [string length]) withTemplate:@"$1"];

should work (I tested the regexp in TextMate but not in XCode).

answered Jul 26 '12 at 08:30

Zoleas

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well, if you want to replace with juste the plain text of the link, you have to have a group between parenthesis somewhere – Zoleas Jul 26 '12 at 08:50
3

sry, wrong copy&paste regex, here is the correct one: "(.*?)<\/a>" – CarlJ Jul 26 '12 at 08:52
3

CarlJ's (.*?)<\/a> works, but should be @"(.*?)" . Thanks a lot! – some_id Sep 26 '13 at 03:09
How would one go about making the plain text clickable? Because now the textview doesn't detect the links anymore – FredFlinstone Jun 18 '18 at 12:52

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 05 '14 at 18:33

@Helium3 and @Carl Explain right above and I want to write as corectly and I created this function for delete a href tag from NSString

-(NSString *)deleteAHref:(NSString *)originalString
{
    NSError *regexError = nil;
    NSRegularExpression *regex = [NSRegularExpression regularExpressionWithPattern:@"<a href=.*?>(.*?)</a>" options:NSRegularExpressionCaseInsensitive error:&regexError];
    NSString *modifiedString = [regex stringByReplacingMatchesInString:originalString options:0 range:NSMakeRange(0, [originalString length]) withTemplate:@"$1"];
    return modifiedString;
}

regular expression in ios to remove href links

2 Answers2