capture part of url with regex

Question

Ok I promise I'll learn regular expressions tonight but right now I need a quick fix. (Really, I swear I will!)

How do I extract the value of what comes after name= this url:

page?id=1&name=hello

In this case I would be trying to isolate 'hello'.

Thanks!

It depends on the language. What language and RegEx client are you using? — Brig Lamoreaux
– Brig Lamoreaux, Commented Jun 29, 2009 at 18:53

instanceof me · Accepted Answer · 2009-06-29 18:53:34Z

3

With most engines:

[\&\?]name\=(.*?)(?:&|$)

You've got it in $1.

answered Jun 29, 2009 at 18:53

instanceof me

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2 Comments

Joey Over a year ago

You don't need to escape & and ? inside character classes, = doesn't need escaping at all and the part after the = could probably be written as ([^&]*) to avoid the lookahead.

instanceof me Over a year ago

There is no lookahead, just a non-capturing group.

Paolo Bergantino · Accepted Answer · 2009-06-29 19:00:17Z

1

What language are you using? Pretty much every language has a utility that will do this for you so you don't have to resort to regex:

PHP:

parse_str(parse_url('page?id=1&name=hello', PHP_URL_QUERY), $query);
print $query['name']; // outputs hello

Python:

>>> from urlparse import urlparse
>>> from cgi import parse_qs
>>> parse_qs(urlparse('page?id=1&name=hello').query)
{'id': ['1'], 'name': ['hello']}

edited Jun 29, 2009 at 19:00

answered Jun 29, 2009 at 18:54

Paolo Bergantino

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3 Comments

Tyler Over a year ago

Yeah I know! But I'm using regex for mod_rewrite :-(

Paolo Bergantino Over a year ago

Ah. I guess I'll leave this here anyways.

Tyler Over a year ago

Thank you for answering! I always appreciate your responses.

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