Regular expression to get link text

Question

I'm stumped! I've googled and read and read and read and I'm sure there is something really dumb that I'm doing wrong. This is from a Greasemonkey script that I can't for the life of me get to initiate AND perform correctly. I'm trying to match this:

<a href="/browse/post/SOMETHING/">**SOMETHING** (1111)</a>

Here's what I'm using:

var titleRegex = new RegExp("<a href=\"/browse/post/\d*/\">(.*) \(");

I'm sure I'm missing some kind of escape characters? But I just can't figure it out so that Firefox doesn't error out.

I generate the regexp using http://regexpal.com/ -- In Firefox error console I receive "unterminated parenthetical"

Answer 1

When building a regex from a string instead of a regex literal, you need to double the backslashes.

Then, \d* only matches digits. I'm assuming that SOMETHING is just a placeholder, but if that were to contain anything but digits, it would fail.

Also, you should be using (.*?) (lazy) instead of (.*) (greedy), or you might be matching too much. Perhaps ([^(]*) would be even better.

Hard to say, though, without knowing more about the actual text you're trying to match.

All in all:

var titleRegex = new RegExp("<a href=\"/browse/post/\\d*/\">([^(]*) \\(");

Answer 2

Here's a simple fix:

/href=\".*?\">(.*?)\(/