I have a bunch of records in a QuickBase table that contain a rich text field. In other words, they each contain some paragraphs of text intermingled with HTML tags like <p>, <strong>, etc.
I need to migrate the records to a new table where the corresponding field is a plain text field. For this, I would like to strip out all HTML tags and leave only the text in the field values.
For example, from the below input, I would expect to extract just a small example link to a webpage:
<p>just a small <a href="#">
example</a> link</p><p>to a webpage</p>
As I am trying to get this done quickly and without coding or using an external tool, I am constrained to using Quickbase Pipelines' Text channel tool. The way it works is that I define a regex pattern and it outputs only the bits that match the pattern.
So far I've been able to come up with this regular expression (Python-flavored as QB's backend is written in Python) that correctly does the exact opposite of what I need. I.e. it matches only the HTML tags:
/(<[^>]*>)/
In a sense, I need the negative image of this expression but have not be able to build it myself.
Your help in "negating" the above expression is most appreciated.
Assuming there are no < or > elsewhere or entity-encoded, an idea using a lookbehind.
(?:(?<=>)|^)[^<]+
See this demo at regex101
(?:(?<=>)|^) is an alternation between either ^ start of the string or looking behind for any >. From there [^<]+ matches one or more characters that are not < (negated character class).
<a href="/company/10676229"
onclick="javascript:_paq.push(['trackEvent', 'SearchSuggestions']);"
title="View company">
<strong>RECRUIT</strong>
" ZONE "
<strong>RECRUITMENT</strong>
" LIMITED "
</a>
I'm trying to extract the text from the above a node in the form "RECRUIT ZONE RECRUITMENT LIMITED" - all on one line - but so far can only get them on separate lines. Since I'm running over a few hundred of these records, all with different patterns of bold and regular text it would be good if i can use an XPath expression to extract all the text on one line straight out, rather than having to use loads of logic afterwards to try and concatenate them together. Stuck with XPath 1.0.
I feel like there would be an expression to do this but struggled with research so far and not sure what else to try.
So far I've tried:
//a[#title="View company"]//text()[normalize-space()]
which returns a list but the text has been separated so all bold text is appearing on different lines to the rest for each a node
XPath 1.0
As already answered by #Andersson (+1), this XPath,
normalize-space(//a[#title="View company"])
will return
RECRUIT " ZONE " RECRUITMENT " LIMITED "
for the markup shown in your question.
In the comments, you've said that your actual markup will include multiple such a elements and that you'd like to select and similarly obtain the text for each. This is not possible with XPath 1.0 alone; you'll have to iterate over selected nodes and process them in the hosting language. In XPath 1.0, only the first of all such a elements will be processed by normalize-space().
XPath 2.0
XPath 2.0 can handle the task with this XPath,
//a[#title="View company"]/normalize-space()
which will apply normalize-space(), which first takes the string value and then trims leading and trailing space and consolidates interior space, for each node selected in the previous step.
Try below to get text content of link as single string:
normalize-space(//a[#title="View company"])
I'm having some difficulty using a RegExp to search for text between HTML tags. This is for a search function to search text on a HTML page without find the characters as a match in the tags or attributes of the HTML. When a match has been found I surround it with a div and assign it a highlight class to highlight the search words in the HTML page. If the RegExp also matches on tags or attributes the HTML code is becoming corrupt.
Here is the HTML code:
<html>
<span>assigned</span>
<span>Assigned > to</span>
<span>assigned > to</span>
<div>ticket assigned to</div>
<div id="assigned" class="assignedClass">Ticket being assigned to</div>
</html>
and the current RegExp I've come up with is:
(?<=(>))assigned(?!\<)(?!>)/gi
which matches if assigned or Assigned is the start of text in a tag, but not on the others. It does a good job of ignoring the attributes and tags but it is not working well if the text does not start with the search string.
Can anyone help me out here? I've been working on this for a an hour now but can' find a solution (RegExp noob here..)
UPDATE 2
https://regex101.com/r/ZwXr4Y/1 show the remaining problem regarding HTML entities and HTML comments.
When searching the problem left is that is not ignored, all text inside HTML entities and comments should be ignored. So when searching for "b" it should not match even if the HTML entity is correctly between HTML tags.
Update #2
Regex:
(<)(script[^>]*>[^<]*(?:<(?!\/script>)[^<]*)*<\/script>|\/?\b[^<>]+>|!(?:--\s*(?:(?:\[if\s*!IE]>\s*-->)?[^-]*(?:-(?!->)-*[^-]*)*)--|\[CDATA[^\]]*(?:](?!]>)[^\]]*)*]])>)|(e)
Usage:
html.replace(/.../g, function(match, p1, p2, p3) {
return p3 ? "<div class=\"highlight\">" + p3 + "</div>" : match;
})
Live demo
Explanation:
As you went through more different situations I had to modify RegEx to cover more possible cases. But now I came with this one that covers almost all cases. How it works:
Captures all <script> tags and their contents
Captures all CDATAblocks
Captures all HTML tags (opening / closing)
Captures all HTML comments (as well as IE if conditional statements)
Captures all targeted strings defined in last group inside remaining text (here it is
(e))
Doing so lets us quickly manipulate our target. E.g. Wrap it in tags as represented in usage section. Talking performance-wise, I tried to write it in a way to perform well.
This RegEx doesn't provide a 100% guarantee to match correct positions (99% does) but it should give expected results most of the time and can get modified later easily.
try this
Live Demo
string.match(/<.{1,15}>(.*?)<\/.{1,15}>/g)
this means <.{1,15}>(.*?)</.{1,15}> that anything that between html tag
<any> Content </any>
will be the target or the result for example
<div> this is the content </content>
"this is the content" this is the result
Dearest StackOverflow homies,
I'm playing with HTML that was output by EverNote and need to parse the following:
Note Title
Note anchor (hyperlink identities of the notes themselves)
Note Creation Date
Note Content, and
Intra-notebook hyperlinks (the
links within the content of a note to another note's anchor)
According to examples by Duncan Temple Lang, author of the [r] XML package and a SO answer by #jdharrison, I have been able to parse the Note Title, Note anchor, and Note Creation Dates with relative ease. For those who may be interested, the commands to do so are
require("XML")
rawHTML <- paste(readLines("EverNotebook.html"), collapse="\n") #Yes... this is noob code
doc = htmlTreeParse(rawHTML,useInternalNodes=T)
#Get Note Titles
html.titles<-xpathApply(doc, "//h1", xmlValue)
#Get Note Title Anchors
html.tAnchors<-xpathApply(doc, "//a[#name]", xmlGetAttr, "name")
#Get Note Creation Date
html.Dates<-xpathApply(doc, "//table[#bgcolor]/tr/td/i", xmlValue)
Here's a fiddle of an example HTML EverNote export.
I'm stuck on parsing 1. Note Contents and 2. Intra-notebook hyperlinks.
Taking a closer look at the code it is apparent the solution for the first part is to return every upper-most* div that does NOT include a table with attribute bgcolor="#D4DDE5." How is this accomplished?
Duncan says that it is possible to use XPath to parse XML according to NOT conditions:
"It allows us to express things such as "find me all nodes named a" or "find me all nodes named a that have no attribute named b" or "nodes a that >have an attribute b equal to 'bob'" or "find me all nodes a which have c as >an ancestor node"
However he does not go on to describe how the XML package can parse exclusions... so I'm stuck there.
Addressing the second part, consider the format of anchors to other notes in the same notebook:
<a href="#13178">
The goal with these is to procure their number and yet this is difficult because they are solely distinguished from www links by the # prefix. Information on how to parse for these particular anchors via partial matching of their value (in this case #) is sparse - maybe even requiring grep(). How can one use the XML package to parse for these special hrefs? I describe both problems here since it's possible a solution to the first part may aid the second... but perhaps I'm wrong. Any advice?
UPDATE 1
By upper-most div I intend to say outer-most div. The contents of every note in an EverNote HMTL export are within the DOMs outer-most divs. Thus the interest is to return every outer-most div that does NOT include a table with attribute bgcolor="#D4DDE5."
"....to return every upper-most div that does NOT include a table with attribute bgcolor="#D4DDE5." How is this accomplished?"
One possible way ignoring 'upper-most' as I don't know exactly how would you define it :
//div[not(table[#bgcolor='#D4DDE5'])]
Above XPath reads: select all <div> not having child element <table> with bgcolor attribute equals #D4DDE5.
I'm not sure about what you mean by "parse" in the 2nd part of the question. If you simply want to get all of those links having special href, you can partially match the href attribute using starts-with() or contains() :
//a[starts-with(#href, '#')]
//a[contains(#href, '#')]
UPDATE :
Taking "outer-most" div into consideration :
//div[not(table[#bgcolor='#D4DDE5']) and not(ancestor::div)]
Side note : I don't know exactly how XPath not() is defined, but if it works like negation in general, (this worked as confirmed by OP in the comment below) you can apply one of De Morgan's law :
"not (A or B)" is the same as "(not A) and (not B)".
so that the updated XPath can be slightly simplified to :
//div[not(table[#bgcolor='#D4DDE5'] or ancestor::div)]
I am creating an application that will take a URL as input, retrieve the page's html content off the web and extract everything that isn't contained in a tag. In other words, the textual content of the page, as seen by the visitor to that page. That includes 'masking' out everything encapsuled in <script></script>, <style></style> and <!-- -->, since these portions contain text that is not enveloped within a tag (but is best left alone).
I have constructed this regex:
(?:<(?P<tag>script|style)[\s\S]*?</(?P=tag)>)|(?:<!--[\s\S]*?-->)|(?:<[\s\S]*?>)
It correctly selects all the content that i want to ignore, and only leaves the page's text contents. However, that means that what I want to extract won't show up in the match collection (I am using VB.Net in Visual Studio 2010).
Is there a way to "invert" the matching of a whole document like this, so that I'd get matches on all the text strings that are left out by the matching in the above regex?
So far, what I did was to add another alternative at the end, that selects "any sequence that doesn't contain < or >", which then means the leftover text. I named that last bit in a capture group, and when I iterate over the matches, I check for the presence of text in the "text" group. This works, but I was wondering if it was possible to do it all through regex and just end up with matches on the plain text.
This is supposed to work generically, without knowing any specific tags in the html. It's supposed to extract all text. Additionally, I need to preserve the original html so the page retains all its links and scripts - i only need to be able to extract the text so that I can perform searches and replacements within it, without fear of "renaming" any tags, attributes or script variables etc (so I can't just do a "replace with nothing" on all the matches I get, because even though I am then left with what I need, it's a hassle to reinsert that back into the correct places of the fully functional document).
I want to know if this is at all possible using regex (and I know about HTML Agility Pack and XPath, but don't feel like).
Any suggestions?
Update:
Here is the (regex-based) solution I ended up with: http://www.martinwardener.com/regex/, implemented in a demo web application that will show both the active regex strings along with a test engine which lets you run the parsing on any online html page, giving you parse times and extracted results (for link, url and text portions individually - as well as views where all the regex matches are highlighted in place in the complete HTML document).
what I did was to add another alternative at the end, that selects "any sequence that doesn't contain < or >", which then means the leftover text. I named that last bit in a capture group, and when I iterate over the matches, I check for the presence of text in the "text" group.
That's what one would normally do. Or even simpler, replace every match of the markup pattern with and empty string and what you've got left is the stuff you're looking for.
It kind of works, but there seems to be a string here and there that gets picked up that shouldn't be.
Well yeah, that's because your expression—and regex in general—is inadequate to parse even valid HTML, let alone the horrors that are out there on the real web. First tip to look at, if you really want to chase this futile approach: attribute values (as well as text content in general) may contain an unescaped > character.
I would like to once again suggest the benefits of HTML Agility Pack.
ETA: since you seem to want it, here's some examples of markup that looks like it'll trip up your expression.
<a href=link></a> - unquoted
<a href= link></a> - unquoted, space at front matched but then required at back
- very common URL char missing in group
- more URL chars missing in group
<a href=lïnk></a> - IRI
<a href
="link"> - newline (or tab)
<div style="background-image: url(link);"> - unquoted
<div style="background-image: url( 'link' );"> - spaced
<div style="background-image: url('link');"> - html escape
<div style="background-image: ur\l('link');"> - css escape
<div style="background-image: url('link\')link');"> - css escape
<div style="background-image: url(\
'link')"> - CSS folding
<div style="background-image: url
('link')"> - newline (or tab)
and that's just completely valid markup that won't match the right link, not any of the possible invalid markup, markup that shouldn't but does match a link, or any of the many problems with your other technique of splitting markup from text. This is the tip of the iceberg.
Regex is not reliable for retrieving textual contents of HTML documents. Regex cannot handle nested tags. Supposing a document doesn't contain any nested tag, regex still requires every tags are properly closed.
If you are using PHP, for simplicity, I strongly recommend you to use DOM (Document Object Model) to parse/extract HTML documents. DOM library usually exists in every programming language.
If you're looking to extract parts of a string not matched by a regex, you could simply replace the parts that are matched with an empty string for the same effect.
Note that the only reason this might work is because the tags you're interested in removing, <script> and <style> tags, cannot be nested.
However, it's not uncommon for one <script> tag to contain code to programmatically append another <script> tag, in which case your regex will fail. It will also fail in the case where any tag isn't properly closed.
You cannot parse HTML with regular expressions.
Parsing HTML with regular expressions leads to sadness.
I know you're just doing it for fun, but there are so many packages out there than actually do the parsing the right way, AND do it reliably, AND have been tested.
Don't go reinventing the wheel, and doing it a way that is all but guaranteed to frustrate you down the road.
OK, so here's how I'm doing it:
Using my original regex (with the added search pattern for the plain text, which happens to be any text that's left over after the tag searches are done):
(?:(?:<(?P<tag>script|style)[\s\S]*?</(?P=tag)>)|(?:<!--[\s\S]*?-->)|(?:<[\s\S]*?>))|(?P<text>[^<>]*)
Then in VB.Net:
Dim regexText As New Regex("(?:(?:<(?<tag>script|style)[\s\S]*?</\k<tag>>)|(?:<!--[\s\S]*?-->)|(?:<[\s\S]*?>))|(?<text>[^<>]*)", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase)
Dim source As String = File.ReadAllText("html.txt")
Dim evaluator As New MatchEvaluator(AddressOf MatchEvalFunction)
Dim newHtml As String = regexText.Replace(source, evaluator)
The actual replacing of text happens here:
Private Function MatchEvalFunction(ByVal match As Match) As String
Dim plainText As String = match.Groups("text").Value
If plainText IsNot Nothing AndAlso plainText <> "" Then
MatchEvalFunction = match.Value.Replace(plainText, plainText.Replace("Original word", "Replacement word"))
Else
MatchEvalFunction = match.Value
End If
End Function
Voila. newHtml now contains an exact copy of the original, except every occurrence of "Original word" in the page (as it's presented in a browser) is switched with "Replacement word", and all html and script code is preserved untouched. Of course, one could / would put in a more elaborate replacement routine, but this shows the basic principle. This is 12 lines of code, including function declaration and loading of html code etc. I'd be very interested in seeing a parallel solution, done in DOM etc for comparison (yes, I know this approach can be thrown off balance by certain occurrences of some nested tags quirks - in SCRIPT rewriting - but the damage from that will still be very limited, if any (see some of the comments above), and in general this will do the job pretty darn well).
For Your Information,
Instead of Regex, With JQuery , Its possible to extract text alone from a html markup. For that you can use the following pattern.
$("<div/>").html("#elementId").text()
You can refer this JSFIDDLE