Regular expression in ios to extract href url and discard rest of anchor tag?

Question

I want to write a url extracting function in objective C. The input text can be anything and may or may not contain html anchor tags.

Consider this:

NSString* input1 = @"This is cool site <a   href="https://abc.com/coolstuff"> Have fun exploring </a>";
NSString* input2 = @"This is cool site <a target="_blank" href="https://abc.com/coolstuff"> Must visit </a>";
NSString* input3 = @"This is cool site <a href="https://abc.com/coolstuff" target="_blank" > Try now </a>";

I want modified string as "This is cool site https://abc.com/coolstuff

Ignoring all text between anchor tag. And need to consider other attributes like _target in anchor tag

I can do something like

static NSRegularExpression *regex = [NSRegularExpression regularExpressionWithPattern:@"<a\shref=\"(.*?)\">.*?</a>" options:NSRegularExpressionCaseInsensitive error:nil];;
NSString* modifiedString = [regex stringByReplacingMatchesInString:inputString options:0 range:NSMakeRange(0, [inputString length]) withTemplate:@"$1"];

Works fine with input1 but fails in other cases.

Thanks

possible duplicate of [Objective-C - Finding a URL within a string](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5998969/objective-c-finding-a-url-within-a-string) — vokilam, Feb 13 '14 at 19:51

score 10 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 13 '14 at 19:43

10

Try this one:

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

answered Feb 13 '14 at 19:43

Sabuj Hassan

38,281
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]+href[ ]*=[ ]*\"(.*?)\"[^>]*>(.*?) is more better. Maybe there are space between "href" and "=". – Viton Zhang Sep 10 '17 at 17:30
How would one use this to make the plain text clickable like a link, so the plain text when clicked will open the href link? – FredFlinstone Jun 18 '18 at 13:30

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 13 '14 at 22:30

5

Or try this one:

<a.+?href="([^"]+)

EXPLAINED

<a - match opening tag

.+? - match anything lazily

href=" - match href attribute

([^"]+) - capture href value

OUTPUT

https://abc.com/coolstuff
https://abc.com/coolstuff
https://abc.com/coolstuff

answered Feb 13 '14 at 22:30

gwillie

1,893
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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 24 '20 at 23:19

0

<[aA].+href[ ]*=[ ]*[\\]?"(.*)[\\]".*>(.+)<\/[aA]>

Here, the first group ($1) captures the url. $2 captures the link text.

answered Sep 24 '20 at 23:19

Shyam Bhat

1,600
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Regular expression in ios to extract href url and discard rest of anchor tag?

3 Answers3

EXPLAINED

OUTPUT

Linked