Repeat Groups to form objects - regex

Question

I have a html table like this:
<table style="width:100%">
<tr>
<td class="country">Germany</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="city">Berlin</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="city">Cologne</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="city">Munich</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="country">France</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="city">Paris</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="country">USA</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="city">New York</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="city">Las Vegas</td>
</tr>
</table>
From this table, I want to generate Objects like the classes Country and City. Country would have a List of Cities.
Now to the problem:
It's easy to create a regex to get all countries and all cities, but i wonder if i can get groups for the cities to repeat until the next country starts? I need to do this, because I can't figure out programmatically which city belongs to which country if I have them in seperated regex-matches.
It should be like (quick&dirty solution):
country">([\w]*)<{.*\n.*\n.*\n.*"city">([\w]*)}
the curly braces should be repeated until the next country item shows up.
If you have a completely different idea on how to get objects out of a html table in c#, let me know!
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Agree that for any non-trivial HTML a HTML parser like HtmlAgilityPack should be used. With that said, if your HTML is as simple as the snippet above, this works, even if there are multiple line breaks in the string:
string HTML = #"
<table style='width:100%'>
<tr><td class='country'>Germany</td></tr>
<tr><td class='city'>Berlin</td></tr>
<tr><td class='city'>Cologne</td></tr>
<tr><td class='city'>Munich</td></tr>
<tr><td class='country'>France</td></tr>
<tr><td class='city'>Paris</td></tr>
<tr><td class='country'>USA</td></tr>
<tr><td class='city'>New York</td></tr>
<tr><td class='city'>Las Vegas</td></tr>
</table>";
var regex = new Regex(
#"
class=[^>]*?
(?<class>[-\w\d_]+)
[^>]*>
(?<text>[^<]+)
<
",
RegexOptions.Compiled | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase
| RegexOptions.IgnorePatternWhitespace
);
var country = string.Empty;
var Countries = new Dictionary<string, List<string>>();
foreach (Match match in regex.Matches(HTML))
{
string countryCity = match.Groups["class"].Value.Trim();
string text = match.Groups["text"].Value.Trim();
if (countryCity.Equals("country", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))
{
country = text;
Countries.Add(text, new List<string>());
}
else
{
Countries[country].Add(text);
}
}