Re^4: Any spider framework?

[bart]

In the case of <a name="foo"> it simply won't match, as the regexp includes href.

And what makes you think the regex would limit itself to a single tag? In your example, the "<a" could be matched while the "href=" would be much further down in the document. In fact, there is no guarantee that that this string is a tag attribute, it could just be in plain html text ("PCDATA"), Javascript code, or even in HTML comments.

To be reliable, a parser (actually just a lexer; it could be regex based) should extract whole tags, and you should then test each on its own. That would be much more reliable.