select HTML text element with regex?

Question

I want to look for © in an HTML document, and basically get the entity the copyright is attributed to.

The copyright line shows up a couple of different ways:

<p class="bg-copy">&copy; 2011  The New York Times Company</p>

or

<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html">
&copy; 2011</a> 
<a href="http://www.nytco.com/">The New York Times Company</a>

or

<br>Published since 1996<br>Copyright &copy; CounterPunch<br>
All rights reserved.<br>

I want to ignore the dates and intervening tags and just get "The New York Times Company" or "Counterpunch".

I haven't been able to find much on using regex with JavaScript or JQuery, though I get the impression that it can lead to major headaches. If there is a better approach to this, let me know.

Answer 1

For a robust solution, you will probably need a combination of DOM navigation and some heuristics. Your examples are solvable with regex, but there are so many more scenarios possible...

&copy;[\s\d]*(?:<\/.+?>[^>]*>)?([^<]*)

works for your three samples. But ONLY for them and similar cases.

See on rubular

Explanation:

© // copyright symbol
[\s\d]* // followed by spaces or digits 
(?:</.+?>[^>]*>)? // maybe followed by a closing tag and another opening one
([^<]*) // than match anything up to the next tag

See this answer on how to use in javascript with jquery. Basically you can use the match(/regex/) function:

var result = string.match(/&copy;[\s\d]*(?:<\/.+?>[^>]*>)?([^<]*)/)