I am writing as SQL query which might return HTML text also. HTML Tags are fine for me, because I want to show it formatted with the HTML tags in the front end. But I do not need links. I mean is there anyway I can strip off the hyper links only from the column. just the anchor tag. I am so bad in Regular Expressions, though i think that might be the solution for this. Any help!
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1 Answer
This should work fine for links:
<a[^>]*>(.*?)<\/a>
Since you say you don't understand regular expressions, I might as well explain. The <a part is straightforward, the [^>]* will match anything up to the closing bracket, the bracket is just the bracket. (.*?) matches anything, regardless of length, empty links as well. The ? is required so that it becomes non-greedy, so it stops at the first closing tag. <\/a> matches the closing tag.
Edit: if you have spaces in between your tags, you can use <a[^>]*>((?:.|\s)*?)<\/a>. Notice I added the (?:.|\s)*? in place of .*?. The .|\s means match any character or space, the ?: indicate a non capturing group, since we don't care which particular character was matched.
7 Comments
Anoop
So Pavlin, this in fact matches the string from the start of the anchor tag to the end of the closing tag, am i right?
Pavlin
Yes, that's right. If you want to remove the tags, just do a replace with the first capture group. The parentheses define the capturing group.
Anoop
Bingo it worked like hell.. :) I did a two replace one for starting and next for the ending tag.. .:)
Anoop
Hey Pavlin, one more question, the reg ex is failing if i have new line character in between the text. any solution for that :(
Pavlin
I edited my answer, it should handle spaces in between the link tags now.
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