Combining Regex in Java

Question

I've some issues with a program which is fetching information out of an html table in Java. To fetch information out of every column I use the following RegEx:

<td>([^<]*)</td>

This works very nice for me. For fetching the Linknames I use this:

<a[^>]*>(.*?)</a>

This is also working very very good. But sometimes I need informations from a column where a link is in. Therefore I wanted to combine these Regex with:

<td>([^<]*)</td>|<a[^>]*>(.*?)</a>

I thought that it would work like this:

It get every thing which is between <td> and </td>
If the thing is a link it get also just the linkname

But this is not working. I'm not the best at RegEx so I need help to combine these two steps.

Thanks very very very much.

"I've some issues with a program which is fetching information out of an html table in Java." Don't parse html with a regex — Falmarri
– Falmarri, Commented Nov 3, 2014 at 20:01
What does this is not working mean? Please give us the code you are using, and a short reproducible example that shows your problem clearly. — Keppil
– Keppil, Commented Nov 3, 2014 at 20:02
I know that a lot of guys don't prefer to parse HTML with regex. But it was always working for me. And I know that there must be a possibility to combine it. — TacoVox
– TacoVox, Commented Nov 3, 2014 at 20:02

TacoVox · Accepted Answer · 2014-11-03 20:05:13Z

1

The code I'm using:

Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("<td>([^<]*)</td>|<a[^>]*>(.*?)</a>");

String line = "Here are the lines saved from the HTML downloader";

Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(line);
for (int startPoint = 0; matcher.find(startPoint); startPoint = matcher.end())
   {
        System.out.prinln(matcher.group(1));
   }

This is just a snippet - but thats how it works in general. (Normally the String is saved in an array).

answered Nov 3, 2014 at 20:05

TacoVox

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3 Comments

Keppil Over a year ago

matcher.group(1) returns null if a link was found.

user557597 Over a year ago

They are already combined. To conjoin into a single capture group, Java would have to do Branch Reset, which is doesn't do. On every match, one of the 2 groups will be null, one won't. All you have to do is check which one. And don't confuse null with the empty string.

TacoVox Over a year ago

I tried now to work with JSoup to parse all these things and it works a lot better - but thank you guys for your help!

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