This paper presents a hybrid approach to the sentiment analysis of online texts. The sentiment of a text refers to the feelings that the author of a text has towards a certain topic. Many existing approaches employ either a pattern-based approach or a machine learning based approach. The former shows relatively high precision in classifying the sentiments, but suffers from the data sparseness problem, i.e. the lack of patterns. The latter approach shows relatively lower precision, but 100% recall. The approach presented in the current work adopts the merits of both approaches. It combines the pattern-based approach with the machine learning based approach, so that the relatively high precision and high recall can be maintained. Our experiment shows that the hybrid approach improves the F-measure score for more than 50% in comparison with the pattern-based approach and for around 1% comparing with the machine learning based approach. The numerical improvement from the machine learning based approach might not seem to be quite encouraging, but the fact that in the current approach not only the sentiment or the polarity information of sentences but also the additional information such as target of sentiments can be classified makes the current approach promising.