Question: Well, here I am back at regex and my poor understanding of it. Spent more time learning it and this is what I came up with:

```
/<a href=\"travis.php?theTaco=([0-9999999])\">(.*)</a>

```

I basically want the number in this string:

```
<a href="travis.php?theTaco=510973">510973</a>

```

My regex is almost good? my original was:

```
"/<a href=\"travis.php?theTaco(.*)\">(.*)<\/a>/";

```

But sometimes it returned me huge strings. So, I just want to get numbers only.
I searched through other posts but there is such a large amount of unrelated material, please give an example, resource, or a link directing to a very related question.

Thank you.

Answer: 
Try using a HTML parser provided by the language you are using.

Reason why your first regex fails: 

`[0-9999999]` is not what you think. It is same as `[0-9]` which matches one digit. To match a number you need `[0-9]+`. Also `.*` is greedy and will try to match as much as it can. You can use `.*?` to make it non-greedy. Since you are trying to match a number again, use `[0-9]+` again instead of `.*`. Also if the two number you are capturing will be the same, you can just match the first and use a back reference `\1` for 2nd one.

And there are a few regex meta-characters which you need to escape like `.`, `?`.

Try:

```
<a href=\"travis\.php\?theTaco=([0-9]+)\">\1<\/a>

```
To capture a number, you don't use a range like [0-99999], you capture by digit. Something like [0-9]+ is more like what you want for that section. Also, escaping is important like codaddict said.