<p>Using regular expressions, what is the simplest way to fetch a websites HTML and find the value inside this tag (or any attribute's value for that matter):</p>

<pre><code>&lt;html&gt;
  &lt;head&gt;
  [snip]
  &lt;meta name="generator" value="thevalue i'm looking for" /&gt;
  [snip]
</code></pre>

Depends on how sophisticated of an Http request you need to build (authentication, etc). Here's one simple way I've seen used in the past.
```
```
StringBuilder html = new StringBuilder();
java.net.URL url = new URL("http://www.google.com/");
BufferedReader input = null;
try {
    input new BufferedReader(
        new InputStreamReader(url.openStream()));

    String htmlLine;
    while ((htmlLine=input.readLine())!=null) {
        html.appendLine(htmlLine);
    }
}
finally {
    input.close();
}

Pattern exp = Pattern.compile(
    "<meta name=\"generator\" value=\"([^\"]*)\" />");
Matcher matcher = exp.matcher(html.toString());
if(matcher.find())
{
    System.out.println("Generator: "+matcher.group(1));
}
```
```
Probably plenty of typos here to be found when compiled.
(hope this wasn't homework)