regex - How do I extract HTML img sources with a regular expression?

Question

I need to extract the src element from all image tags in an HTML document.

So, the input is an HTML page and the output would be a list of URL's pointing to images: ex... http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif

The following is what I came up with so far:

<imgs+src=""(http://.*?)

This does not work for tags where the src isn't directly after the img tag, for example:

<img height="1px" src="spacer.gif">

Can someone help complete this regular expression? It's pretty easy, but I thought this may be a faster way to get an answer.

Answer 1

The following regexp snippet should work.

<img[^>]+src="([^">]+)"

It looks for text that starts with <img, followed by one or more characters that are not >, then src=". It then grabs everything between that point and the next " or >.

But if at all possible, use a real HTML parser. It's more solid, and will handle edge cases much better.