Optimal Way To Extract A Url From Web Page Loaded Via Xmlhttprequest?

Problem Overview I have a dynamically produced web page, X, which consists of search results linking to web pages, Y1, Y2, Y3 etc. Y1 contains a resource URL R1, Y2 contains resou

Solution 1:

You don't want to use regex to extract the URL. I suggest using jQuery to perform the AJAX request, and then use jQuery to parse and filter out the URLs from the HTML that is returned from the server.

jQuery.ajax({
    url: "http://my.url.here",
    dataType: "html";
    ...
    success: function(data) {
        jQuery("a", data).each(function() {
            var $link = jQuery(this);
            ...
            ...
        });
    }
    ...
});

If jQuery is not an option, you can do something like this when you get your response back:

var html = XHR.responseText;
var div = document.createElement("div");
div.innerHTML = html;

//you can now search for nodes inside your div.//The following gives you all the anchor tags
div.getElementsByTagName('a'); 
...