RegExp Expression any multiple characters with linebreaks and whitespaces

Question

My regex is for finding certain words in text, and not words inside elemental text.

REGEXP

RegExp('\\b([^<(.*?)>(.?+)<\/(.*?)>])(' + wregex.join('|') + ')\\b(?=\\W)

EXAMPLE

This is some text that should be looked through
though this text <code>Should not be looked at </code> and this text is ok to 
look at

So I'll explain my method of my regex Expression which I am having trouble with

([^<(.*?)>(.?+)<\/(.*?)>]) Do Not match any text that starts with <element> nothing inside here until this </element>

Thats the most important so I've tried multiple methods and not sure if this regex is possible. I don't want to match anything starting with a basic html element tag until the ending tag appears then start over searching.

EDIT I know that RegEx shouldn't be used to parse HTML this is looking through TEXT

Testing Example HERE

I have to post this, due to its relevance (once again): see [here](http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/2030691) for a discussion of why using regex to parse HTML is bad. — Xynariz, Mar 07 '14 at 23:48
They were each different variable names. tregex wregex iregex or something like that. And Xynariz I know this I'm using this on text. — EasyBB, Mar 08 '14 at 00:12

sabof · Answer 1 · 2014-03-08T00:07:39.527

0

Why crum everything in a single regex? It can be as simple as this. Notice that I'm using [^] instead of ., to also match newlines.

string.replace(/<[^]+?<\/[^]+?>/, '').match(/what i really want to find/gi)

And yes, this is prone to breakage, as any regex solution would be.

edited Mar 08 '14 at 00:07

answered Mar 07 '14 at 23:50

sabof

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I believe this will break on nested tags, just to note. – Fabrício Matté Mar 07 '14 at 23:56
It's good enough if he only has `` tags. Trying to make it more accurate would be perverse. – sabof Mar 07 '14 at 23:58
Yeah I know. I didn't downvote your answer as you've put effort in solving OP's question, even though I'm aware (as well as whoever downvoted) that regex is not a proper solution for this general use case. – Fabrício Matté Mar 08 '14 at 00:00
As you can see how I am using the regex is the reason why I am crumming this in one line – EasyBB Mar 08 '14 at 00:08

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:57

0

Assuming that the text you are searching over is correctly formed (as in, no tag mismatches) the following regex should work:

^([^<]*<([^>]*)>[^<]*</\2>)*[^<]Your Text

This insures that you text is outside of an open and closed set of tags by matching all open and closed sets before getting to your text.

It won't work for nested tags. Regex is incapable of parsing arbitrarily nested tags.

However, please remember, you should not parse html with regex

edited May 23 '17 at 11:57

Community

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answered Mar 07 '14 at 23:56

Damien Black

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I'm aware not to parse HTML with Regex thats why I said text, it's all text format, which is what I was getting at lol. – EasyBB Mar 08 '14 at 00:07

RegExp Expression any multiple characters with linebreaks and whitespaces

2 Answers2