T-SQL search html with regex?

Question

In my database I have a field wich contains a html document. Now there must be a possibility to search in this document. However, the html tags may not be found. So when I have something like this:

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Bar</title>
  </head>
  <body>
   <p>
     this content my be found
   </p>
  </body>
</html>

It is possible that the document stored in the database is not xhtml. Can you tell me what the best way is to search in the content? Shall i use regular expressions? And of so, how would it look like? ANd if not, what should I use else?

Joel Coehoorn · Accepted Answer · 2009-04-21 13:00:23Z

2

You could try turning on Full-Text Search or use something like Lucene.Net to index the content for you.

answered Apr 21, 2009 at 13:00

Joel Coehoorn

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Marc Gravell · Accepted Answer · 2009-04-21 13:01:27Z

2

What volume of records are there? I expect you might have to use full-text search and an IFilter to do this efficiently. Html does not lend itself well to regex - it can quickly be very hard to do something very simple.

If the volume isn't huge, can you iterate over the records with an external parsing application, using something like the HTML Agility Pack (for .NET) - or any other DOM of your choice.

But the FTS/IFilter would be my first choice.

answered Apr 21, 2009 at 13:01

Marc Gravell

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2 Comments

Martijn Over a year ago

The search has to be done in 5 tables. Each table has a few 100 records. How do I use the FTS and IFilter?

Marc Gravell Over a year ago

Looks to be under the "Management" node in Management Studio.

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