Ignore First Character in Regex Match

Question

I need to ignore the > in my regular expression in the beginning.

My regular expression:

/(>(.+)(?=<\/a>))/igm

Matches the following:

enter image description here

How do I tell it to ignore the > in the beginning?

Here is the regular expression on regexr.com.

positive lookbehind, though it doesnt work in regexr.com for some reason. — Ed Morales, Jun 30 '14 at 20:46
@EdwardM.B.: the reason is that the lookbehind feature isn't available in Javascript. — Casimir et Hippolyte, Jun 30 '14 at 20:48
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/590747/using-regular-expressions-to-parse-html-why-not — epascarello, Jun 30 '14 at 20:49

score 12 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 30 '14 at 20:46

12

Possible workaround would be to match non > characters:

[^>]+(?=<\/a>)

Or you take the substring of each of your results in the code itself.

answered Jun 30 '14 at 20:46

Jerry

Thank you! I was using `.splice(1)`, but it said it can't splice from null. so then I had to add `.toString()` – Matthew Jun 30 '14 at 20:48

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 30 '14 at 20:59

5

You can use:

.*?>(\w+)<

Regular expression visualization

Here you can check a working example:

answered Jun 30 '14 at 20:59

Federico Piazza

2 Answers2