From: Csaba Henk <csaba@..._for_avoiding_spam.org>
Date: 2005-03-25T22:34:47+09:00
Subject: Re: (Maybe) a simple question about regex

On 2005-03-24, Sam Kong <sam.s.kong@gmail.com> wrote:
> What I was trying to solve was...
> To extract url's from an html source which includes list of sites.
> They are formatted like <a href="something.html">.
> But I wanted to exclude <a href="index.html"> from the list.
> So (?!index.html) will do.
> Actually my toy case was not well-defined (I realized this later) and
> thus it required more complex solutions like your second case -
> s.scan(/(?!45|5)\d\d/) .

Why don't you use a dedicated html parser? Eg. there's htmltokenizer,
available ar Rubyforge, quite lightweight and very easy to use, but
there are others, of course.

> I think non-RE solution would be better like Mr. Robert Klemme said.
> But I wanted to learn some RE.

This thread was useful, I admit :)

Csaba