Jmeter regular expression for multiline HTML

Question

I want to write regular expression extractor for following:

</td><td>
                        <a href="/Service/Details/118?OID=544" title="Click to view details">118</a>
                    </td><td>
                        <img src="/Media/Images/Opr/544.png" title="" />
                    </td><td style="1">
                        1

I wrote it as below:

</td><td>
                    <a href="/Service/Details/(.+?)?OID=(.+?)" title="Click to view details">(.+?)</a>
                </td><td>
                    <img src="/Media/Images/Opr/(.+?).png" title="" />
                </td><td style="1">
                   (.+?)

but it is not working. please help.

Answer 1

There is an option multi line mode which you can use to extract string from multiline.

Reference :- http://jmeter.apache.org/usermanual/regular_expressions.html

Extract :- The single-line (?s) and multi-line (?m) modifiers are normally placed at the start of the regex.

Example:- Try single line mode for jmeter Extract "String" here

Regular expression would be : (?s)Try single line mode for jmeter.?Extract "(.?)" here

Output:- String

Let me know if you have any question

Answer 2

I doubt regular expressions will help there, would rather suggest going for one of the following:

• CSS/Query Extractor
• XPath Extractor

If you need assistance in creating a relevant CSS/Query or XPath expression - update your question with more lines so it would be possible to see DOM tree, preferably upload full page source code somewhere.

Answer 3

The only issue with your regex is that your regex contains special (meta) characters like '<', '/' etc. which are being used as expression without using the escapes character. Such characters must be escaped by preceding them with \ (backslash) in order to treat them as ordinary characters, else your regex will throw error and will not work.

List of such characters can be obtained from the mentioned link.

1.  ( ) - grouping
2.  [ ] - character classes
3.  { } - repetition
4.  * + ? - repetition
5.  . - wild-card character
6.  \ - escape character
7.  | - alternatives
8.  ^ $ - start and end of string or line

I modified your regex with '\' escapes character and it is working fine e.g.

href=\"\/Service\/Details\/(.+?)\?OID=(.+?)" title="Click to view details"\>(.+?)\<\/a\>

this gives me 118, 544 and 118

Try with escape character and it should work fine. Also, if you want to pass them as parameters to other requests, better is to use multiple post request regex extractor in same request with different parameters name.

JMeter also provides the Regex tester in Tree view, where you can test your regex before implementing or you can test it online from this site (many other such sites are available for regex testing).

Update:

OP asked to extract value from 4th line

HTML:

</td><td>
                        <a href="/Service/Details/118?OID=544" title="Click to view details">118</a>
                    </td><td>
                        <img src="/Media/Images/Opr/544.png" title="" />
                    </td><td style="1">
                        1

Regex:

<\/td><td>
                        <a href="\/Service\/Details\/(.+?)\?OID=(.+?)" title="Click to view details">(.+?)<\/a>
                    <\/td><td>
                        <img src="\/Media\/Images\/Opr\/(.+?).png" title="" \/>
                    <\/td><td style="1">
                        1

Output: 118, 544, 118, 544