Extract text between two tags using regex in Ruby

Question

Let say I have this string which contains html a tag:

Berlin-Treptow-Köpenick
<         


        

Answer 1

I have made the assumption that the string to be extracted is comprised of alphanumeric characters--including accented letters--and hyphens, and that the string immediately follows the first instance of the character '>'.

string =
'<a href="abgeordnete-1128-0----w8397.html" class="small_link">Berlin-Treptow-Köpenick</a>'

r = /
    (?<=\>)       # match '>' in a positive lookbehind
    [\p{Alnum}-]+ # match >= 0 alphameric character and hyphens
    /x            # extended or free-spacing mode

string[r] #=> "Berlin-Treptow-Köpenick"

Note that /A-Za-z0-9/ does not match accented characters such as 'ö'.

Alternatively, one can use the POSIX syntax:

r = /(?<=\>)[[[:alnum:]]-]+/

Answer 2

You could use:

html = '<a href="abgeordnete-1128-0----w8397.html" class="small_link">Berlin-Treptow-Köpenick</a>'
html.match(/>(.*)</)[1]
#=> "Berlin-Treptow-Köpenick"

When your html partial get more complex then I would recommend looking libraries like nokogiri.

Answer 3

string = '<a href="abgeordnete-1128-0----w8397.html" class="small_link">Berlin-Treptow-Köpenick</a>'

string.scan(/<[a][^>]*>(.+?)<\/[a]>/).flatten