Regular Expression any char between html-tags

[Sebastian Green]

I want to fetch any data between a <td>sart tag and </td>end tag. I only find examples for getting the tags and not the data...

[James Sabre]

Hi,

You don't say whether or not you have other tags within your <td> tags, whether or not there can be a new line within the <td> tag or whether or not you can have more than one on one line so take the following as a starting point.

import java.util.regex.*;

public class Test20040913
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("<td>([^<]*)</td>", Pattern.MULTILINE);

String lines = "some rubbish <td>value 1</td> some futher \nrubbish <td>value \n2</td> and more again";
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(lines);
for (int startPoint = 0; matcher.find(startPoint); startPoint = matcher.end())
{
System.out.println(" Value found at " + matcher.start(1) + " with value [" + matcher.group(1) + "]");
}
}
}

[Sebastian Green]

Well in my td tag there wont be another htmltag. No new lines, just a-z&0-9.. your code didnt do the trick. Here is my String

  
String data = "String data = "</TD>  </TR>  <TR BGCOLOR=#FFFFFF>    <TD VALIGN=top CLASS=mbr>7 r</TD>    <TD ALIGN=right VALIGN=top CLASS=mbr>2 st</TD>    <TD ALIGN=right VALIGN=top CLASS=mbr>6 194 834 p</TD>  </TR>  <TR BGCOLOR=#E3E3E3>";

The value I want is "7 r", "2 st" & "6 194 834 p".

Thansk for your time!

[Rovas Kram]

This might be overkill but you could use an xml parser and get the values from the 'TD' elements.

[James Sabre]

Change the pattern to

Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("<td[^>]*>([^<]*)</td>", Pattern.MULTILINE | Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);

This still makes several severe assumptions about your requirements. One can only generate an effective regular expression if the requirements are well specified and without a good specification one is only guessing.

You are reaching the point where you might do better to use a tolerant XML parser to generate a DOM document. A Google search could be effective.

[James Sabre]

Sorry Rovas, I had my blinkers on and I didn't spot your post!

It looks like you and I agree about it possible being better to use an XML parser!