javascript regex to extract anchor text, URL, and target from anchor tags

Question

I am attempting to extract the parts (URL, target, text) of an anchor as I loop through a Json response and am unable to do so.

I found this question/answer which got me 95% of the way there:

javascript regex to extract anchor text and URL from anchor tags

var input_content = "blah \
    <a href=\"http://yahoo.com\">Yahoo</a> \
    blah \
    <a href=\"http://google.com\">Google</a> \
    blah";

var matches = [];

input_content.replace(/[^<]*(<a href="([^"]+)">([^<]+)<\/a>)/g, function () {
    matches.push(Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments, 1, 4));
});

alert(matches.join("\n"));

//Gives

//<a href="http://yahoo.com">Yahoo</a>,http://yahoo.com,Yahoo
//<a href="http://google.com">Google</a>,http://google.com,Google

I have not been able to modify the above regex to grab the target. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I'm not sure you have access to jQuery (also this is probably slower than a native regex) but you could extract the markup string from the JSON response and wrap it in jQuery for easy human-readable processing:

$links.find('a').each(function(){
   var text = $(this).text();
   var target = $(this).attr('target');
   var href = $(this).attr('href');

   // Do whatever you were going to do
});