How do I read the text between href tags and return the results in a cell array?

Currently, I have an html webpage saved in a text format. Below is an example of the portion of the text I am interested in:

    <a href='/some/1056-text-stuff'>

I want to search the text document for every case the "<a href='\some\ " pattern appears and extract the text between the tokens, i.e.

/some/1056-text-stuff

Matlab has regexp, match and tags but I am struggling to pick out the string cleanly. Ideally, I would like to search the document and return a cell array of strings which lists all of the matches. Here is my current code:

str= fileread('C:\Users\Me\Documents\MATLAB\trial.txt');  %read in text file
urls = regexp(str, 'href=(\S+)(\s*)$', 'tokens', 'lineAnchors');    %find urls

Answer 1

[Julian]

You can try something like

>> RE='<a[\s]+href="(?<target>.*?)"[^>]*>(?<text>.*?)</a>';
>> list=regexp(html, RE, 'names')

I can recommend this tool https://www.regexbuddy.com/

[StuartG]

Thank you very much, the regex command was giving me a lot of grief. I tailored your expression a little bit and it worked perfectly.

[Ana Alonso]

Hi there,

What do the (?<target>.*?) and (?<text>.*?) expressions correspond to?

I've never worked with html before and I'm just trying to scrape urls from the html code.

Thanks!