Matching last occurance of character using Regex

Question

I need to match:

<p><span style="font-size: 18px;"><strong>Hello</strong></span></p>

I need to match the text hello between the last > and the first </

Using (?=>)(.*?)(?=</) returns <span style="font-size: 18px;"><strong>Hello

Thanks!

The last `>` comes after `` – that's why one shouldn't use regular expressions for parsing HTML — knittl, Oct 09 '13 at 13:20
possible duplicate of [RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags) — Dustin Kingen, Oct 09 '13 at 13:33

Ovidiu · Answer 1 · 2013-10-09T14:18:12.227

2

I know this is not the answer you were looking for but parsing html with regex is like eating soup with a fork. You'll get the job done eventually but it's very frustrating.

Try this instead and keep your sanity:

string html = "<p><span style=\"font-size: 18px;\"><strong>Hello</strong></span></p>";
System.Xml.Linq.XDocument doc = System.Xml.Linq.XDocument.Parse(html);
string hello = doc.Descendants().LastOrDefault().Value;

edited Oct 09 '13 at 14:18

answered Oct 09 '13 at 13:29

Ovidiu

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It's not always strong, sometimes it doesn't have strong, only p etc – Dimo Oct 09 '13 at 14:15
@Dimo Added `doc.Descendants().LastOrDefault()` to get the last element – Ovidiu Oct 09 '13 at 14:39

Vince · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-09T13:30:13.967

1

You could go with

/>([^<>]+)</

That should give you the desired match.

edited Oct 09 '13 at 13:30

answered Oct 09 '13 at 13:18

Vince

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Small improvement: `>([^<>]+)<`, now the desired text is in the 1st capture group. http://rubular.com/r/l8Z4oXR0HL – Matt Burland Oct 09 '13 at 13:21
Oh, I intended to write it like that, it was a typo ^^ Thanks for the notice. – Vince Oct 09 '13 at 13:30

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 09 '13 at 13:22

0

Do you only need to match this specific string? If yes, then you could simply use:

/<strong>([^<]*)</strong>/

which will match any text between the strong tags.

answered Oct 09 '13 at 13:22

Fabian

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 09 '13 at 13:22

Try this

The constant variable for regex is

const string HTML_TAG_PATTERN = "<.*?>";

The function

 static string StripHTML(string inputString)
        {
            return Regex.Replace
              (inputString, HTML_TAG_PATTERN, string.Empty);
        }

and call the function like

string str = "<p><span style='font-size: 18px;'><strong>Hello</strong></span></p>";

str = StripHTML(str);

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Oct 09 '13 at 14:11

I think your first look ahead must look more like : (?<=>) (look behind for >)

And replace .*? by [^<>]* (anything but < or >).

If you need to keep your look around you can do : (?<=>)([^<>]*)(?=</)

If not, you can simply do : >([^<>]*)</

The difference is that using look around you won't capture < neither </ in the global match.

Matching last occurance of character using Regex

5 Answers5

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