Reg-ex query is too greedy - regex

Question

Consider the following snippet:
<Offering id=1 blah blah templateid=abc something=blah
gretre
rtert
ret
tr
/Offering>
<Offering id=2 blah blah templateid=def something=blah>
gretre
rtert
ret
tr
</Offering>
<Offering id=3 blah blah templateid=ghi something=blah>
gretre
rtert
ret
tr
</Offering>
Given that all I know is the template id, I need to return the whole Offering node that contains it. i.e. for templateid=def, I need to return:
<Offering id=2 blah blah templateid=def something=blah>
gretre
rtert
ret
tr
</Offering>
I've tried all sorts but the closest I can get is something along the lines of (?s)<Offering.+?templateid=def.+?</Offering> which returns from the first offering until the end of the offering containing my template id. I understand why but nothing I've tried can fix it. I'm guessing lookarounds but I just can't get it right.
How can I return the whole offering node?

Answer 1

You could modify your regex using negation and I would probably use a word boundary as well.
<Offering[^>]*\btemplateid=def[^>]*>[^<]*</Offering>
If you have other tags inside of this tag, you could do ...
(?s)<Offering[^>]*\btemplateid=def.+?</Offering>

Answer 2

This should work but please notice that I escaped the / character, and you may not need to do that depending on what language you're using:
(<Offering[^>]* templateid=ghi [^>]*>[^<]*<\/Offering>)

Answer 3

As you say you "need to return the whole Offering node", the arguably simpler, safer and more readable way would be a DOM parser. I've included examples of how you might do this in JavaScript and PHP below.
PHP
$doc = new DOMDocument();
#$doc->loadHTML($testStr); //Only needed if you're loading HTML like in the example which has repeated attributes and other things that could cause errors
$body = $doc->getElementsByTagName('body')->item(0);
$templateID = 'def';
$myNode = null;
foreach($body->childNodes as $node)
{
if($node->nodeName=='offering')
{
if($node->attributes->getNamedItem('templateid')->nodeValue == $templateID)
{
$myNode = $node;
}
}
}
//$id = $myNode->attributes->getNamedItem('id')->nodeValue;
//$html = $doc->saveHTML($myNode)
JavaScript
var testStr = document.getElementById('str_container').innerHTML;
var parser = new DOMParser();
var doc = parser.parseFromString(testStr,'text/html');
var templateID = 'def';
var myEl = null;
for(var i=0,c=doc.body.children.length;i<c;i++)
{
if(doc.body.children[i].getAttribute('templateid')===templateID)
{
myEl = doc.body.children[i];
}
}
//var id = myEl.id;
//var html = myEl.outerHTML;
console.log(myEl || 'not found');
JavaScript >= IE8
var testStr = document.getElementById('str_container').innerHTML;
var parser = new DOMParser();
var doc = parser.parseFromString(testStr,'text/html');
var templateID = 'def';
var myEl = doc.body.querySelector('offering[templateid='+templateID+']');
//var id = myEl.id;
//var html = myEl.outerHTML;
console.log(myEl || 'not found');