String to long for Regex?

Hello!

I have a website loaded into a string which is 1262594 chars long. I want to do a RegExp-search on it to find all the links to a page like:

Code:

---

Pattern = "<a(.[^<>]*)href([ \\s]*)=([ \\s'\"]*?)(http://|https://)([^<>'\"\\?]*?)(example.com)([^'\"> ]*)(['\" ]*)(.*?)>(.*?)</a>";
Regex myRegex = new Regex(Pattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Singleline);
Console.WriteLine("Done Regex");
MatchCollection mc = myRegex.Matches(html);
Console.WriteLine("Done Matches");
if (mc.Count == 0) {
Console.WriteLine("Done mc.Count");
}
Console.WriteLine("Done all");

---

This works fine for shorter strings, but the program hangs-up itself using long string: The main-window just freezes, no exception called or anything else. I waited about 30 minutes and then killed the process.

The output is:

Done Regex
Done Matches

... so it seems that the if (mc.Count == 0) crashes somehow.

When setting a breakpoint at the if (mc.Count == 0) and look at mc.Count in the Auto-Watch-Window, I get:
Count Function evaluation disabled because a previous function evaluation timed out. You must continue execution to reenable function evaluation. int
Step a line further crashes the applicaiton as well.

Any ideas about that?

you're using "." dots in your expression without escaping them. do you really mean to match any character there?

Thanks for your reply.

Changing the pattern to (see the bold part):

Code:

---

Before:
Pattern = "<a(.[^<>]*)href([ \\s]*)=([ \\s'\"]*?)(http://|https://)([^<>'\"\\?]*?)(example.com)([^'\"> ]*)(['\" ]*)(.*?)>(.*?)</a>";
After:
Pattern = "<a(.[^<>]*)href([ \\s]*)=([ \\s'\"]*?)(http://|https://)([^<>'\"\\?]*?)(example.com)([^'\"> ]*)(['\" ]*)(.[^>]*?)>(.*?)</a>";

---

did the trick and it runs without problems again.

If you see any other optimizations, I would be glad to know. I don't know if there is a way to optimize the last (.*?) before the </a> (because here every char matches, except a </a> is following).

this "([ \\s]*)" is actually the same as "([\\s]*)" becase \s already matches whitespace characters

You are right, thank you.