Regex href match a number

Well, here I am back at regex and my poor understanding of it. Spent more time learning it and this is what I came up with:

/<a href=\"travis.php?theTaco=([0-9999999])\">(.*)</a>

I basically want the number in this string:

<a href="travis.php?theTaco=510973">510973</a>

My regex is almost good? my original was:

"/<a href=\"travis.php?theTaco(.*)\">(.*)<\/a>/";

But sometimes it returned me huge strings. So, I just want to get numbers only. I searched through other posts but there is such a large amount of unrelated material, please give an example, resource, or a link directing to a very related question.

Thank you.

Try using a HTML parser provided by the language you are using.

Reason why your first regex fails:

[0-9999999] is not what you think. It is same as [0-9] which matches one digit. To match a number you need [0-9]+. Also .* is greedy and will try to match as much as it can. You can use .*? to make it non-greedy. Since you are trying to match a number again, use [0-9]+ again instead of .*. Also if the two number you are capturing will be the same, you can just match the first and use a back reference \1 for 2nd one.

And there are a few regex meta-characters which you need to escape like ., ?.

Try:

<a href=\"travis\.php\?theTaco=([0-9]+)\">\1<\/a>

To capture a number, you don't use a range like [0-99999], you capture by digit. Something like [0-9]+ is more like what you want for that section. Also, escaping is important like codaddict said.

Others have already mentioned some issues regarding your regex, so I won't bother repeating them.

There are also issues regarding how you specified what it is you want. You can simply match via

/theTaco=(\d+)/

and take the first capturing group. You have not given us enough information to know whether this suits your needs.