iOS Struggling with regular expressions

[isthisonetaken]

Hey All,

I have an app that gets some returned data from a website and stores it in an NSString. The returned data is HTML with some information I want to get that's dynamic (it's always different when the data is returned). The stuff I'm looking for is buried within the HTML in lines like this:

<td align="center" colspan="1"> <a class="ada" title="11:00 P.M.">11:00 P.M.</td><td align="left" colspan="1"> TO Some Destination</td>

I tried using an XML scanner, but it kept failing out with errors not liking the way the returned code was formatted I guess. After doing some Googling, it seems I should be using regular expressions to do a search through the string to find the data. I have this so far:

// create a regex to find the times in the returned string
    NSRegularExpression *timeRegex = [[NSRegularExpression alloc] initWithPattern:@""
                                                                          options:NSRegularExpressionCaseInsensitive error:nil];
    // find an array of the times
    NSArray *times = [timeRegex matchesInString:self.returnedDataString options:0 range:NSMakeRange(0, [self.returnedDataString length])];

My problem is the regex expression which right now is @"", which obviously isn't what I want. I read about regular expressions, but still don't really know how to start? I should mention as well that there are normally multiple times and occasionally no times returned.

Any thoughts or help?

 

[ArtOfWarfare]

I'm not quite sure how to do what you want, but an idea I have would be, if times are always given in A.M. Or P.M. (as opposed to 24 hour time, my preferred format,) then you could search for the string ".M." - it seems quite improbable that that series of characters would appear outside of a string giving the time. Then just look at the characters before that.

 

[robvas]

Have your website return JSON instead