Javascript RegExp match text between <a> tags

Try this:

/<a[^>]*>([\s\S]*?)<\/a>/ 

• <a[^>]*> matches the opening a tag
• ([\s\S]*?) matches any characters before the closing tag, as few as possible
• <\/a> matches the closing tag

The ([\s\S]*?) captures the text between the tags as argument 1 in the array returned from an exec or match call.

This is really only good for finding text within a elements, it's not incredibly safe or reliable, but if you've got a big page of links and you just need their text, this will do it.

A much safer way to do this without RegExp would be:

function getAnchorTexts(htmlStr) { var div, anchors, i, texts; div = document.createElement('div'); div.innerHTML = htmlStr; anchors = div.getElementsByTagName('a'); texts = []; for (i = 0; i < anchors.length; i += 1) { texts.push(anchors[i].text); } return texts; } 

I don't have experience with Regex, but I think you can use JQuery with .text() !

JQuery API - .text()

I mean if you use :

var hrefText = $("a").text(); 

You will get your text without using Regex!

.find("a") and then gives you a list of a's tags objects and then use .each() to loop on that list then you can get the text by using .text().

Or your can use a class selector, id or anything you want!