Regular expression for html links

Question

Hi, I'm trying to get text/link pairs from a string, accepted links
are like:
text1
text2
The expected result would be:
url: url1
Text: text1
url: url2
Text: text2
I use the following regular expression to catch the texts and the urls:
"<a href=\"*(.*)\"*.*>(.*)</a>"
group(1) should be the url and group(2) the text.
But it doesn't work ok, I got something like:
url: http://url1/" garbagetags
text: text1
url: utl2
text: text2
I'm trying to avoid links with " and without it and dinamic html
tags.
I think the problem is the Regular Expression string, I'm new using
them and I can't found the right one, if you know what's wrong with
my R.E. string, please help me.!
thanx

Answer 1

Had to break it in to two regular expressions:
import java.util.regex.*;
class B2  {
   public static void main(String[] args) {
        //String INPUT = "<a href=\"http://url1/\" garbagetags>text1</a>";
        //String INPUT = "<a href=url2>text2</a>";
        //String INPUT ="<a href=\"http://www.google.com\">Google search engine</a>";
          String INPUT="<a id=1a class=q href=\"/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8\" onClick=\"return c('www.google.com/imghp','wi',event);\"><font size=-1>Images</font></a>";
        //String REGEX = "<a .*href=\\\"?h?t?t?p?:?/?/?([\\w\\.\\?\\&=\\-\\d]*)/?\\\"?.*>(.*)</a>";
        String REGEX = "<a .*href=\\\"?h?t?t?p?:?/?/?([\\w\\.\\?\\&=\\-\\d]*)/?\\\"?.*>";
        String REGEX2 = ">\\b([\\w\\s\\d]+)\\b<";
        Pattern p = Pattern.compile(REGEX);
        Matcher m = p.matcher(INPUT);
        StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
        if ( m.find() ) {
        System.out.println(m.group(1) + "     " );  }
        else { System.out.println("No MAtch found");  }
        Pattern p2 = Pattern.compile(REGEX2);
        Matcher m2 = p2.matcher(INPUT);
        if ( m2.find() ) {
        System.out.println(m2.group(1) + "     " );  }
        else { System.out.println("No MAtch found");  }
} You do realize that you'll never get 100% accuracy with this. There are too many possible variations to account for them all.