Ruby match part of escaped html string

Question

How do I match the id of this escaped html string? Part of the string starts with id=\" and ends with \" In this example I need art_images_attributes_0_attachement

"<div class=\"input string optional\"><label class=\"string optional\" for=\"art_images_attributes_0_attachement\"> Attachement</label><input class=\"string optional\" id=\"art_images_attributes_0_attachement\" maxlength=\"255\" name=\"art[images_attributes][0][attachement]\" size=\"50\" type=\"text\" /></div>"
 => "<div class=\"input string optional\"><label class=\"string optional\" for=\"art_images_attributes_0_attachement\"> Attachement</label><input class=\"string optional\" id=\"art_images_attributes_0_attachement\" maxlength=\"255\" name=\"art[images_attributes][0][attachement]\" size=\"50\" type=\"text\" /></div>"

Best regards. Asbjørn Morell

Andrew Clark · Accepted Answer · 2011-03-16 16:14:25Z

1

The following regex will capture your desired outputp:

/id="([^"]*)"/

And a Rubular: http://www.rubular.com/r/dtXqK2GBPe

Note that there is not actually a \ character before the quotation marks, in Ruby the content of the string "id=\"test\"" is id="test", the \ is just there to escape any " that should be included.

And so that it will also work with escaped quotes inside of the id value, you can use this:

/id="([^"\\]*(?:\\.[^"\\]*)*)"/

http://www.rubular.com/r/b66eWno8Ce

edited Mar 16, 2011 at 16:14

answered Mar 16, 2011 at 16:01

Andrew Clark

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1 Comment

atmorell Over a year ago

Thank you this was exactly what I was looking for. string.match(/id="([^"]*)"/)[1]

Nick · Accepted Answer · 2011-03-16 16:00:38Z

0

Regex-wise this would do it:

id=\\\"(.+?)\\\"

answered Mar 16, 2011 at 16:00

Nick

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2 Comments

atmorell Over a year ago

Nick, your example returns nil

Nick Over a year ago

As explained by Andrew's answer. My (naive) answer was based on the idea that I needed to match exactly what was in your question - I didn't appreciate that the \s were to be ignored.

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