Matching href any string between two known strings

Question

I'm trying to match multiple hrefs in a html page and I can't seem to get it working. When I use my regex, I get no matches. How can I get multiple matches of the entire href breaking them into the two specified groups?

Sample href of many to match:

<a href="/string1/any string here/string2">text here</a>

My regex code:

MatchCollection m1 = Regex.Matches(result, @"<a\shref=""(?<url>(\/string1\/).*?(\/string2))"">(?<text>.*?)</a>", RegexOptions.Singleline);

This works, but matches hrefs I'm not interested in addition to the ones I need:

MatchCollection m1 = Regex.Matches(result, @"<a\shref=""(?<url>(\/string1\/).*?)"">(?<text>.*?)</a>", RegexOptions.Singleline);

Answer 1

As mentioned in comments, use a real html parser like HtmlAgilityPack instead of Regex

HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument();
doc.LoadHtml(@"<a href=""/string1/any string here/string2"">text here</a>");

var links = doc.DocumentNode
                .SelectNodes("//a[@href]")
                .Select(a=>a.Attributes["href"].Value)
                .ToList();

or without xpath

var links = doc.DocumentNode
                .Descendants("a")
                .Where(a=>a.Attributes["href"]!=null)
                .Select(a=>a.Attributes["href"].Value)
                .ToList();