Dave’s Blog for OC & The World

Regular Expressions Syntax

Here are some code snippets to parse through HTML and strip out useful content I used for a .NET forms based screen scraping application written in C#.

Strip out all tags except <a/> tags:

s = Regex.Replace(s,”(</*[^aA](.|\n)+?>)+”,”\n”);

Pull the link from the href and discard the surrounding tags:

s = Regex.Replace(s,”< [aA]\\s*href=\”([^\"]*)\”\\s*>”,”$1\n”);

Turn numbered sections into a match collection (specific to my implementation but you get the idea):

MatchCollection mc =
Regex.Matches(s,”^(\\d+\\.)(\n(?!\\d+\\.).*){1,}”,RegexOptions.Multiline);

Then you can iterate through the match collection, splitting it into columns of a dataset AddRow and then update it back to the database.

Haacked shows a code listing for an exe that when run, builds a fully compiled version of your regular expression into an assembly that you can then reference in any project:
Building a Regular Expression Library Source Listing