javascript extract html block from string

You could try something like the below:

var a = $(str).find('a').html();

1. make it innerHTML of a temporary div.
2. use getElementsByTagName("A") to retreive all "A" nodes.
3. get their HTML .

Here is a running example : http://jsfiddle.net/3fZch/

var str = '<div id="xyz"><p>This is a paragraph</p><a href="http://bs.serving-sys.com/BurstingPipe/adServer.bs?cn=brd&FlightID=2997227&Page=&PluID=0&Pos=9088" target="_blank"><img src="http://bs.serving-sys.com/BurstingPipe/adServer.bs?cn=bsr&FlightID=2997227&Page=&PluID=0&Pos=9088" border=0 width=300 height=250></a></div>';


var newElem = returnTheParentNode(str);
var anchors = newElem.getElementsByTagName('A');
/* anchors has all the a tags of the html string */
    for(var i = 0 ; i < anchors.length ; i++)
    {
      var aHTML = getHTML(anchors[i]);
      alert(aHTML);   
    }




function returnTheParentNode(htmlStr)
{
var myCont = document.createElement('DIV'); // create a div element
myCont.innerHTML = htmlStr; // create its children with the string
return myCont;  // return the parent div

}

function getHTML(theNode)
{
    var myCont = document.createElement('DIV');
    myCont.insertBefore(theNode,null);
    return myCont.innerHTML ;
}

The expression you need is:

str.match(/a href="([^"]*)"/)[1]

But this assumes there is only one a tag in your string and you used double quotes to delimit the href.

Made a jsfiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/eDAuv/

Why not extract the link BEFORE you store it in a string?

myLink = $(".myDiv a").html() 

This could work:

var link = $(str).find("a").get(0).outerHTML;
alert(link);