Regular expression for extracting tag attributes

Token Mantra response: you should not tweak/modify/harvest/or otherwise produce html/xml using regular expression.

there are too may corner case conditionals such as \' and \" which must be accounted for. You are much better off using a proper DOM Parser, XML Parser, or one of the many other dozens of tried and tested tools for this job instead of inventing your own.

I don't really care which one you use, as long as its recognized, tested, and you use one.

my $foo  = Someclass->parse( $xmlstring ); 
my @links = $foo->getChildrenByTagName("a"); 
my @srcs = map { $_->getAttribute("src") } @links; 
# @srcs now contains an array of src attributes extracted from the page. 

Although the advice not to parse HTML via regexp is valid, here's a expression that does pretty much what you asked:

/
   \G                     # start where the last match left off
   (?>                    # begin non-backtracking expression
       .*?                # *anything* until...
       <[Aa]\b            # an anchor tag
    )??                   # but look ahead to see that the rest of the expression
                          #    does not match.
    \s+                   # at least one space
    ( \p{Alpha}           # Our first capture, starting with one alpha
      \p{Alnum}*          # followed by any number of alphanumeric characters
    )                     # end capture #1
    (?: \s* = \s*         # a group starting with a '=', possibly surrounded by spaces.
        (?: (['"])        # capture a single quote character
            (.*?)         # anything else
             \2           # which ever quote character we captured before
        |   ( [^>\s'"]+ ) # any number of non-( '>', space, quote ) chars
        )                 # end group
     )?                   # attribute value was optional
/msx;

"But wait," you might say. "What about *comments?!?!" Okay, then you can replace the . in the non-backtracking section with: (It also handles CDATA sections.)

(?:[^<]|<[^!]|<![^-\[]|<!\[(?!CDATA)|<!\[CDATA\[.*?\]\]>|<!--(?:[^-]|-[^-])*-->)

• Also if you wanted to run a substitution under Perl 5.10 (and I think PCRE), you can put \K right before the attribute name and not have to worry about capturing all the stuff you want to skip over.

You cannot use the same name for multiple captures. Thus you cannot use a quantifier on expressions with named captures.

So either don’t use named captures:

(?:(\b\w+\b)\s*=\s*("[^"]*"|'[^']*'|[^"'<>\s]+)\s+)+

Or don’t use the quantifier on this expression:

(?<name>\b\w+\b)\s*=\s*(?<value>"[^"]*"|'[^']*'|[^"'<>\s]+)

This does also allow attribute values like bar=' baz='quux:

foo="bar=' baz='quux"

Well the drawback will be that you have to strip the leading and trailing quotes afterwards.

Update 2021: Radon8472 proposes in the comments the regex https://regex101.com/r/tOF6eA/1 (note regex101.com did not exist when I wrote originally this answer)

<a[^>]*?href=(["\'])?((?:.(?!\1|>))*.?)\1?

Update 2021 bis: Dave proposes in the comments, to take into account an attribute value containing an equal sign, like <img src="test.png?test=val" />, as in this regex101:

(\w+)=["']?((?:.(?!["']?\s+(?:\S+)=|\s*\/?[>"']))+.)["']?

---

Update (2020), Gyum Fox proposes https://regex101.com/r/U9Yqqg/2 (again, note regex101.com did not exist when I wrote originally this answer)

(\S+)=["']?((?:.(?!["']?\s+(?:\S+)=|\s*\/?[>"']))+.)["']?

Applied to:

<a href=test.html class=xyz>
<a href="test.html" class="xyz">
<a href='test.html' class="xyz">
<script type="text/javascript" defer async id="something" onload="alert('hello');"></script>
<img src="test.png">
<img src="a test.png">
<img src=test.png />
<img src=a test.png />
<img src=test.png >
<img src=a test.png >
<img src=test.png alt=crap >
<img src=a test.png alt=crap >

---

Original answer (2008): If you have an element like

<name attribute=value attribute="value" attribute='value'>

this regex could be used to find successively each attribute name and value

(\S+)=["']?((?:.(?!["']?\s+(?:\S+)=|[>"']))+.)["']?

Applied on:

<a href=test.html class=xyz>
<a href="test.html" class="xyz">
<a href='test.html' class="xyz">

it would yield:

'href' => 'test.html'
'class' => 'xyz'

Note: This does not work with numeric attribute values e.g. <div id="1"> won't work.

Edited: Improved regex for getting attributes with no value and values with " ' " inside.

([^\r\n\t\f\v= '"]+)(?:=(["'])?((?:.(?!\2?\s+(?:\S+)=|\2))+.)\2?)?

Applied on:

<script type="text/javascript" defer async id="something" onload="alert('hello');"></script>

it would yield:

'type' => 'text/javascript'
'defer' => ''
'async' => ''
'id' => 'something'
'onload' => 'alert(\'hello\');'