This was difficult information to find.  I searched for a method using Notepad++, Vim for windows, and a few others, but finally found the easy way to do this using – of all things – Microsoft Word.

I’ll spare you the details of the other methods I attempted and just give you the detailed answer of how to accomplish this with Microsoft Word.

So I’ll use my scenario as the example for what you might want to use this for.

I had a bunch of html code from which I needed to extract every instance of anchor text between the <a href=”…”></a> tags.  In this particular case here is how you accomplish this:

Your needs will most likely be different and you will need to research a bit if you’re unfamiliar with regular expressions.  Even if you are familiar with regular expressions (as I am) you’ll still probably need to do a little research to get the exact expression that will work for you.  I’m sure there are regex gurus out there who dream in regex, but in my case I find that I always have to spend more time than I would like just coming up with the syntax for the regular expression that will provide me the results I am looking for.  Microsoft Word regular expressions.

Here are the results in my scenario (which is exactly what I want… well, not exactly.  I’d like to just get the text in between the <a> and </a> tags, but I don’t know how to do that in one step.  The only way I know to do it is to include the “> and the </a> at the beginning and end of the regular expression so that it captures what I’m looking for):

In the “Replace with:” field put this code -> “\1″ (without the quotation marks)

Make sure the “Use wildcards” checkbox is checked and then click “Replace All”

Kudos and thanks to Ivaylo for posting his workaround which led to my finding this solution and expanding on it here.