Please help me interpret this pattern

[Jacob Sonia]

("<a\\b[^>]*href=\"[^>]*>(.*?)</a>")

I understand that * means 0 or more. [^] means negation, ? means 0 or 1, but i still cannot understand the whole pattern.

Thanks,
See

[Wouter Oet]

Here you can lookup what the other characters mean. Just by scanning it it appears to match a html link tag <a href="something">Something else</a>

[Campbell Ritchie]

Not too hot on regexes myself, but I think

A less-than                                                                                    <
The letter a                                                                                   a
A backslash escaping b which means the boundary (here beginning) of a word.                    \\b
Any number of things which aren't greater-than, followed by href and an equals sign            [^>]*href=
A double-quote                                                                                 \"
Any number of characters which aren't greater-than                                             [^>]*
A greater-than                                                                                 >
Any number of any character (probably except line-end)                                         (.
with a reluctant quantifier                                                                    *?)
A closing anchor HTML tag                                                                      </a>

Are you short of a second double-quote? You open quotes after href, but I can't see a closing quote.

That's what I can make of it. Let's see whether Rob has managed a better and quicker answer

[Campbell Ritchie]

Wouter Oet wrote:Here you can lookup . . .

Good idea. Another place to look is the Pattern class.

[Rob Spoor]

Campbell Ritchie wrote:Let's see whether Rob has managed a better and quicker answer

I would have split [^>]*href= into two separate parts, and would have explained the parentheses a bit more, but other than that it's a good explanation. And yes, a closing \" is missing.

These parentheses are probably actually used as a capturing group, allowing the user to get the hyperlink's label through the regex.