SLRE regex doesn't work properly

Question

I have a problem with SLRE library, I can't figure out how to stop grabbing everything after my match. Let's say I have a html output and somewhere in the middle of buffer there is line I want to parse

name="id" value="1a2b3c4d5e6f" />

Here is my regular expression

slre_compile(&test, "name=\"id\" value=\"(.*?)\" />")

I have read about greedy and non-greedy flags in other threads where people used to have similar problem as me, but in my case adding ? to the expression doesn't change anything. SLRE returns me match starting from 1a2b3c4d5e6f" /> and shows rest of the html page ending on </html> tag, just I don't know why. It is cutting the beginning of the html source but leaves everything after my expression. I have also tried following regex

slre_compile(&test, "^.*?name=\"id\" value=\"(.*?)\" />.*?$")

and some others, modified with greedy and non-reedy flags, which gave me same results. Does anyone know why SLRE can't stop at " /> and continues capturing characters till the source string ends?

@m.buettner it matches nothing, 0 bytes should I change the regex library to something more reliable? — user2648790, Aug 03 '13 at 15:19
I don't know SLRE, so I don't know whether that's the issue. Try replacing `\" />` with `\"\\s*/>` as well. Maybe there's a mismatch with your whitespace. — Martin Ender, Aug 03 '13 at 15:31
@m.buettner still captures unnecessary html code after matched value — user2648790, Aug 03 '13 at 16:11
No. Stop! Read the accepted answer on [this question](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags). Now! Don't do this! — Cole Tobin, Aug 03 '13 at 16:57

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 03 '13 at 16:58

0

it seems that SLRE does not understand non-greedy qualifiers and parses .*? instead as if it were (?:.*)?. However, in this case \"[^\"]*\" should work...

answered Aug 03 '13 at 16:58

Antti Haapala -- Слава Україні

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Unfortunately, it is also matching wanted value and rest of the page. Too bad, I though SLRE would be a perfect native crossplatform library but it seems it lacks some standard features or I'm just too stupid for this and I'm doing something completely wrong. – user2648790 Aug 03 '13 at 17:35

SLRE regex doesn't work properly

1 Answers1