Regex - Find URLs with Embedded Spaces

Dick Adams 0

I need to check HTML pages for URLs with embedded spaces. The URL I’ve come up with so far:

href=".*? +?.*?">

It finds this URL as expected:

href="url with spaces">

but then it gives a false positive on this subsequent URL:

href="../../../../../bio/d/y/k/e/dykes_jb.htm">John B. Dykes</a><span class="verbose">

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Terry R

@Dick-Adams-0
What you are trying to do is difficult but the forum’s resident regex guru (@guy038 ) has already made some posts here.

I’m not going to try to give you the exact regex but it will be worthwhile you reading those posts. In particular his 2nd post in that thread which looks to be exactly what you are seeking (with obvious character replacements).

Terry

PeterJones

@Dick-Adams-0 ,

Your regex probably needs to be more restrictive. I know you tried to restrict it by making it non-greedy ? , but that’s not always enough.

Try [^"]*? instead of .*? in at least the first and maybe both instances of .*? .

The first might even want to be [^"\s]*? so that it allows neither quotes nor whitespace characters.

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PeterJones

@Terry-R said in Regex - Find URLs with Embedded Spaces:

has already made some posts here.

And as slightly more of a hint: the search zone would begin with href=" and end with " . (If you tried the simpler begin with " , you would find that it would sometimes match between the end of one URL and the beginning of the next, and it wouldn’t work, which might frustrate you; the zone-matching works best when the start and end markers can be distinguished.)