Comments on: Capturing Multiple, Optional HTML Attribute Values

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:47:43 +0000

@Philip, I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to do, since bold, italic, and underline are merely values for their related CSS properties. If you're just checking for the existence of certain words within your style attribute, that's unrelated to this post. Also, you haven't mentioned which regex flavor you're using. In any case, if you need one-on-one regex advice I'd recommend regexadvice.com or the RegexBuddy forums.

By: Phillip

Phillip — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 19:16:22 +0000

Could you help me modify your regex so that it captures multiple attributes of a style? for example I want to capture only the styles bold, italics an underline. styled text many thanks

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 21:00:45 +0000

@George, I’m not sure what you’re describing as “the new string”, but the regexes discussed here work fine in RegexBuddy 3.1. If you have v3.x, I would recommend asking for help on its integrated forum. If not, I would recommend you upgrade.

By: George Fisher

George Fisher — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 12:48:13 +0000

Thanks again. I’m probably doing something wrong but copying the new string into my trusty RegexBuddy doesn’t produce a match. Without the backrefs, but not with.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 04:04:10 +0000

@George, you're very welcome. Note that if you wanted the attributes to be required while maintaining the rest of the regex's flexibility, you could use backreferences to empty capturing groups like so (I'll just use the first two attributes from your regex to keep it short): \s+(?:alt="([^"]*)"()|class="([^"]*)"())|[^\s>]+|\s+)*\2\4> Backref one would be the alt value, backref three would be the class value, and backrefs two and four are just overhead towards making the magic happen.