From: Christian Kruse <ckruse@...>
Date: 2002-03-24T07:22:43+09:00
Subject: Re: extracting multi-line <a> tags?

Hoi,

On Sun, 24 Mar 2002 04:47:28 +0900
Tobias Reif <tobiasreif@pinkjuice.com> wrote:

> > NOTE: What I mean here is that I would like to match the beginning of the
> > a href tag as one "token", then put the contents of the tag in another
> > token, while putting the </a> closer tag in yet another token.

[...]

> ---------8<----------
> a = '<a
> href="http://foo">
> foo
> </a>
> '
> a =~ /(<a.+?href=['"](.+?)['"].*?>)(.+?)(<\/a>)/m

When Ruby's RE-Engine works a little bit like Perls, a RegEx like
/(<a.+?href=['"]([^"']+)['"][^>]*>)(.+?)(<\/a>)/

Will be faster and more efficient.

Greets,
 CK