RegEx over multipe lines

Question

I want to extract only the "Mlody" string from the below code. Matching should start from <dt>User</dt> and end at </dd> on the next line. I need some help on the RegEx code required. HTML code is below.

<dl>
<dt>User</dt>
<dd><a href="/users/837">Mlody</a></dd>
<dd></dd>
</dl>

[What have you tried?](http://mattgemmell.com/2008/12/08/what-have-you-tried/) — Niet the Dark Absol, Mar 30 '13 at 14:10
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags — Boris the Spider, Mar 30 '13 at 14:11
From the doc: ". any character, including newline (s=true)", so I guess you have to make sure that s is set to true in the configuration. — Snæbjørn, Mar 30 '13 at 15:30

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 30 '13 at 14:47

As a general rule, you shouldn't use a regex to match/parse the HTML text.

Instead, try a DOM parser (if available) and search for the tag you need, and then search the text content of those results with a regex if you need to match against the contents.

Only if you don't have any other option decide to use regex.

You can try following regex for matching multiline text:

<dt>User</dt>((?:.|[\r\n])*?)</dd>

RegEx over multipe lines

1 Answers1