Regular expression to match any table tag

Question

I'm trying to write a regular expression to see if a string contains any of the typical table tags:

<table></table>
<td></td>
<th></th>
<tr></tr>
<thead></thead>
<tfoot></tfoot>
<tbody></tbody>

Along with tags that may contain other attributes e.g:

<table border="1">

I've come up with this so far, however, it matches <br /> tag and I'm not sure why:

/<\/?[table|td|th|tr|tfoot|thead|tbody]{1,}>?/

http://www.rexfiddle.net/20Xtqka

It's matching br because of the square brackets and the "tr". You are just saying, match at least one of these characters with the square brackets — jpmuc, Nov 04 '13 at 21:57

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 04 '13 at 21:56

0

Regular expressions use parentheses, not square brackets, to group things. A set of characters inside square brackets matches any of those characters.

/<\/?(table|td|th|tr|tfoot|thead|tbody)+>?/

When you want to match 1 or more of something, use + rather than {1,}.

answered Nov 04 '13 at 21:56

Barmar

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The basic concept of using regular expressions to parse HTML is flawed. Please see [this](http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/127145). Thanks! – Aleph Dvorak Nov 04 '13 at 22:01
That should be a comment on the original question, not my answer. – Barmar Nov 04 '13 at 22:02

Regular expression to match any table tag

1 Answers1