Regular expression in ios to extract href url and discard rest of anchor tag?

Question

I want to write a url extracting function in objective C. The input text can be anything and may or may not contain html anchor tags.

Consider this:

NSString* input1 = @"This is cool site <a   href="https://abc.com/coolstuff"> Have fun exploring </a>";
NSString* input2 = @"This is cool site <a target="_blank" href="https://abc.com/coolstuff"> Must visit </a>";
NSString* input3 = @"This is cool site <a href="https://abc.com/coolstuff" target="_blank" > Try now </a>";

I want modified string as "This is cool site https://abc.com/coolstuff

Ignoring all text between anchor tag. And need to consider other attributes like _target in anchor tag

I can do something like

static NSRegularExpression *regex = [NSRegularExpression regularExpressionWithPattern:@"<a\shref=\"(.*?)\">.*?</a>" options:NSRegularExpressionCaseInsensitive error:nil];;
NSString* modifiedString = [regex stringByReplacingMatchesInString:inputString options:0 range:NSMakeRange(0, [inputString length]) withTemplate:@"$1"];

Works fine with input1 but fails in other cases.

Thanks

Answer 1

Try this one:

<a[^>]+href=\"(.*?)\"[^>]*>.*?</a>