# Help with sayregexp and regular expressions

**URL:** <https://community.mp3tag.de/t/help-with-sayregexp-and-regular-expressions/41220>\
**Category:** Web Sources Discussion\
**Created:** [March 28, 2018, 12:48am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/help-with-sayregexp-and-regular-expressions/41220 "2018-03-28T00:48:27Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![chuck](https://community.mp3tag.de/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/8e7dd6/32.png) [@chuck](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/chuck)\
**Post date:** [March 28, 2018, 12:48am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/help-with-sayregexp-and-regular-expressions/41220/1 "2018-03-28T00:48:27Z")

</div>

Hello,  
I am attempting to use the web services framework to process IMDB pages and I am trying to use sayregexp to extract actor names from an element in a table. I can extract the actor names cleanly via a regex pattern:

`(<span class=\"itemprop\" itemprop=\"name\">)([^<]+)(</span>)`

where $1 will extract the actor name. The problem I am having is I can't figure out an easy way to use sayregexp to put $1 into the output buffer. As I understand it, sayregexp will take all matches for the provided regular expression and put them into the output buffer, but I do not see a way to only put $1 from the matched regular expression into the output buffer. Is there any way to accomplish what I want to do?

Thanks!

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Florian](https://community.mp3tag.de/user_avatar/community.mp3tag.de/florian/32/5759_2.png) [@Florian](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/Florian)\
**Post date:** [March 28, 2018, 6:34pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/help-with-sayregexp-and-regular-expressions/41220/2 "2018-03-28T18:34:04Z")

</div>

You can probably use `(?:...)` instead of `(...)` to create non-capturing groups. This way, you can control which group appears in the output.