Exclude certain words while including other patterns in regex

Question

I have this string:

<a href="..">..</a></td><a href="Example.pdf">Example.pdf</a>

I would like to get all the links and I do so with this regular expression:

href=\"([^/]*?)\"

However, I would like the regular expression to ignore this specific string:

..

How would I modify my regular expression to achieve this exclusion?

[Don't parese HTML with regex](http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/5459839). What is your programming language? (See the usage description of the `regex` tag) — trincot, Apr 13 '17 at 22:12
I'm using Swift. I'm not trying to parse HTML - just capture a specific pattern. — etayluz, Apr 13 '17 at 22:36
Whether to parse, extract, find, or otherwise interpret, ...that advise stands. I added the tag for you ;-) — trincot, Apr 13 '17 at 22:39

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 13 '17 at 22:40

0

This one based on a negative lookahead should work : <a.+?href=["'](?!\.\.)([^"']+)["'].*?>(.+?)<\/a>

Use Group 1 to extract link of each match

answered Apr 13 '17 at 22:40

Stephane Janicaud

1 Answers1