How do I find a string in string with regex?

Question

Despite my many efforts to learn RegEx, I find this quite hard todo, so I'm asking the community for help.

So, I have this string:

<html><head>
<title>Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<a href="goforward?U=as4395897a8druasfdas833a">Go</a>
</body>
</html>

Now I want to find as4395897a8druasfdas833a using a regex. This code is not inside an "" in the real word, although I would like to search for "goforward?U" (that one is always the same).

Thanks in advance.

That looks like HTML. It might be better to use an HTML parser. — Mark Byers, Mar 14 '11 at 23:20
Further to Mark Byers's remark, see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags#1732454 . — Gareth McCaughan, Mar 14 '11 at 23:22

score 6 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 14 '11 at 23:21

In your example code, this would work:

goforward\?U=(\w+)

But more information is needed to get it more precise. Since I don't know what "actually" contains or what ends the term you want to find I can't give an exact regular expression so if you comment with more details I can tweak it.

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 14 '11 at 23:24

4

This should work:

goforward\?U=[a-z0-9]+

answered Mar 14 '11 at 23:24

user470714

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You plagiarized me AND vbence. ;-) – Josh M. Mar 14 '11 at 23:32
Nah, I just posted later than you. Plus when I tested yours the () were screwing me up. C'mon, don't bust my chops here, my rep is still low ; ] – user470714 Mar 14 '11 at 23:42
Fun to be back in the kindergarten :). – kapa Mar 15 '11 at 08:13

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 14 '11 at 23:22

2

Try with this:

goforward\?U=([a-z0-9]+)

answered Mar 14 '11 at 23:22

vbence

19,714
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I'm a dirty thief on intellectual property :) – vbence Mar 14 '11 at 23:35

How do I find a string in string with regex?

3 Answers3