I have content something like
<div class="c2">
<div class="c3">
<p>...</p>
</div>
</div>
What I want is to match the div.c2's inner HTML. The contents of it may vary a lot. The only problem I am facing here is that how can I make it to work so that the right closing div is taken?
You can't. This problem is unsolvable with classic regular expressions, and with most of the existing regex implementations.
However, some regex engines have special support for balanced pair matching. See, e.g., here (.NET). Though even in this case your regex will be able to parse only a subset of syntactically correct texts (e.g., what if a < /div > is embedded in a comment?). You need an HTML parser to get reliable results.
Any chance this will always be valid XHTML? If so, you'd be better off parsing it as XML than trying to regex this.
Delete the first line, delete the last line. Problem solved. No need for RegEx.
The following pattern works well with .Net RegEx implementation:
\<div class="c2"\>{[\n a-z.<>="0-9/]+}\</div\>
And we replace that with \1.
Input:
<div class="c2">
<div class="c3">
<p>...</p>
</div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
</div>
Output:
<div class="c3">
<p>...</p>
</div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
Related
I just don't get my Regex right:
I have the following template:
<!-- Defines the template for the tabs. -->
{{TMPL:Import=../../../../Data/Templates/Ribbon/tabs.tmpl; Name=Tabs}}
<div class="tabs">
<ul role="tablist">
{{BOS:Sequence}}
<li role="tab" class="{{TabType}}" id="{{tabId}}">
<span>{{TabFile}}</span>
</li>
{{EOS:Sequence}}
</ul>
</div>
{{Render:Tabs}}
I would like to find everything between {{}} except the tags that begins with {{BOS, {{EOS, {{TMPL, {{Render
Here are a couple approaches:
Attempt 1:
({{).*(}})
This selects everything between {{ }} tags, which is not good.
Attempt 2:
({{)[^TMPL][^BOS][^EOS][^Render].*(}})
This will make that {{TabType}} and {{TabFile}} are not selected anymore and I just don't know why.
With some other regex, I get that {{TabType}}" id="{{tabId}} is selected as one match.
Does anyone have a clue on how to solve this, I really need a regex Guru :-)
You can use negative lookahead based regex like this:
{{(?!TMPL|[BE]OS|Render).*?}}
RegEx Demo
You have to use the following regex to get the content between braces:
\{\{(.*?)\}\}
Working Demo
If you want to exclude the content from the comment you posted you can use a regex technique to exclude what you don't want and keep what you want at the end of the regex:
\{\{BOS:Sequence\}\}|\{\{EOS:Sequence\}\}|\{\{TMPL:Import.*?\}\}|\{\{Render:Tabs\}\}|\{\{(.*?)\}\}
Working demo
By the way, if you want to have a shortcut for above regex you can use:
\{\{(?:BOS|EOS):Sequence\}\}|\{\{TMPL:Import.*?\}\}|\{\{Render:Tabs\}\}|\{\{(.*?)\}\}
This is a very useful technique for pattern exclusion that I glad to learn it from Anubhava and zx81 (they rock using regex pattern). For this regex technique you can find the content you need using capturing groups (check the green highlights on the screenshot below):
Using [^TMPL] and the like won't work because these are character classes. You could use a negative lookahead, though (or even lookbehind depending upon the regex library you are using).
\{\{(?!BOS:)(?!EOS:)(?!Render:)(?!TMPL:)(.*?)\}\}
Still I get the feeling that you want the BOS, EOS, etc. to just be strings in the template with {{ and other values to be interpolated. If you are using handlebars or something, you can have strings interpolated:
{{'{{BOS:Sequence}}'}}
I have some html which I want to grab between 2 tags. However nested tags exist in the html so looking for wouldn't work as it would return on the first nested div.
Basically I want my regex to..
Match some text literally, followed by ANY character upto another literal text string. So my question is how do I get [^<]* to continue matching until it see's the next div.
such as
<div id="test"[^<]*<div id="test2"
Example html
<div id="test" class="whatever">
<div class="wrapper">
<fieldset>Test</fieldset><div class="testclass">some info</div>
</div>
<!-- end test div--></div>
</div>
<div id="test2" class="endFind">
In general, I suspect you want to look at "greedy" vs "lazy" in your regex, assuming that's supported by your platform/language.
For example, <div[^>]*>(.*?)</div> would make $1 match all the text inside a div, but would try to keep it as small as possible. Some people call *? a "lazy star".
But it seems you're looking to find the text within a div that is before the start of the first nested div. That would be something like <div[^>]*>(.*?)<div
Read about greedy vs lazy here and check to make sure that whatever language you're using supports it.
$ php -r '$text="<div>Test<div>foo</div></div>\n"; print preg_replace("/<div[^>]*>(.*?)<div.*/", "\$1", $text);'
Test
$
Regex is not capable of parsing HTML. If this is part of an application, you're doing something wrong. If you absolutely have to parse a document, use a html/xml parser.
If you're trying to screen scrape something and don't want to bother with a parser, look for identifying marks in the page you're scraping. For example, maybe the embedded div ends just before the one you want to match, so you could match </div></div> instead.
Alternatively, here's a regex that meets your requirements. However, it is very fragile: it will break if, for example, #test's children have children, or the html isn't valid, or I missed something, etc, etc ...
/<div id="test"[^<]*(<([^ >]+).+<\/$2>[^<]*)*<\/div>/
I need a regular expression to find <ul> tags within <p> tags. This would be an example of text that matches what I am looking for:
blah
<p style="font-size: 10pt;">blah</p>
<p style="font-size: 10pt;"><ul><li>blah</li></ul></p>
blah
Although I think that it's really better to use some HTML/XML parser to do this, you can try to use negative lookahead in regex, so in your case you could use
(<p[^>]*>(?:(?!</p>).)*)(<ul[^>]*>.*</ul>)
But this only works if there is only one <ul> in-between the <p></p>, if there are more the regex would become a wa-a-ay more complex, and in some terms there'd be a need to use a function as a replace.
I'm very new to PHP writing and regular expressions. I need to write a Regex pattern that will allow me to "grab" the headlines in the following html tags:
<title>My news</title>
<h1>News</h1>
<h2 class=\"yiv1801001177first\">This is my first headline</h2> <p>This is a summary of a fascinating article.</p> <h2>This is another headline</h2> <p>This is a summary of a fascinating article.</p> <h2>This is the third headline</h2> <p>This is a summary of a fascinating article.</p> <h2>This is the last headline</h2> <p>This is a summary of a fascinating article.</p>
So I need a pattern to match all the <h2> tags. This is my first attempt at writing a pattern, and I'm seriously struggling...
/(<h+[2])>(.*?)\<\/h2>/ is what I've attempted. Help is much appreciated!
I'm not too familiar with PHP, but in cases like this it's usually easier to use XML parser (which will automatically detect <h2> as well as <h2 class="whatever"> rather than regex, which you'll have to add a bunch of special cases to. Javascript, for example has XML DOM exactly for this purpose, I'd be surprised if PHP didn't have something similar.
The easiest way to do it via regex is
#<h2\b[^>]*>(.*?)</h2>#is
This will match any h2 tag and capture its contents in backreference $1. I've used # as a regex delimiter to avoid escaping the / later on in the regex, and the is options to make the regex case-insensitive and to allow newlines within the tag's contents.
There are circumstances where this regex will fail, though, as pointed out correctly by others in this thread.
I have only checked in RegexBuddy, there following regex works:
<h2.*</h2>
I have the following code grabbed from a webpage source code:
<span>41,396</span>
And the following regex:
("<span>.*</span>")
Which returns
<span>New Users</span>
However, I don't want to have the tags in the results. I've tried a few things, but Regular Expressions are new to me.
More so than this I need to get the Regex for the following code:
<span>41,396</span>
</span>
<span class="levelColumn">
<span>2,150</span>
</span>
<span class="xpColumn">
<span>161,305,807</span>
I was thinking this may involve line breaks and more, which is why I threw this is separately.
You could try something like
<span( class=\".+\")?>(.*)</span>
And then get capture group 2 for the tag's body. But be aware that regular expressions are NOT good for parsing HTML/XML. What would happen if you had nested <span> tags?
If the input gets even the slightest bit more complicated than what you've shown, look for an HTML parser and try using that instead.
You can use capturing group differently to get the value instead of tag + value
"<span>(.*)</span>"
Think to use a HTML parsing library in your language of choice if regex become more complicated.
As far as I know regex will lookup line by line, but you could have an expression that would work that out.
Try: <span>(.*)</span>
You should be able to retrieve the information you want with \1
In the case of <span class="xpColumn"> it would just not match and \1 would be empty..
Cheers :)