Title: Extracting HTML URL Links
Submitter: Ken Simpson (other recipes)
Last Updated: 2001/05/24
Version no: 1.0
Category: Networking

Description:

This regular expression is not very accurate, but it's fast and adequate for many situations.

Usage: Text Source

#!/usr/bin/perl -n00

# qxurl - tchrist@perl.com

print "$2\n" while m{
    < \s*
      A \s+ HREF \s* = \s* (["']) (.*?) \1
    \s* >
}gsix;

The license for this recipe is available here.

Discussion:

A more complete URL extractor (by Tom Christiansen) is available on CPAN at http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/Tom_Christiansen/scripts/xurl.gz

It's slower, but more accurate and still faster than a full HTML parser such as HTML::Parser.