Will this Java regex return a single result or multiple

Question

If my HTML is:

<tr><td>....</td><hr></tr>
<tr><td>....</td><hr></tr>
<tr><td>....</td><hr></tr>
<tr><td>....</td><hr></tr>
<tr><td>....</td><hr></tr>
<tr><td>....</td><hr></tr>

If my regex is:

Patterp p = Pattern.compile("<tr>(.*)<hr></tr>");

Should this get 1 result or all the individual rows?

Is there a way to force it to get all the rows and not just the entire html from the top <tr> to the last instance of <hr></tr> ?

score 11 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 09:57

11

Your regex is using .* which is greedy. Try using .*? instead. A greedy match will grab as much as it can before matching following tokens, so it will go find the last <hr> in your source text. A non-greedy match will grab as little as it can before matching the next token(s).

Then, see this answer for more information about parsing HTML with regular expressions.

edited May 23 '17 at 09:57

Community

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answered Apr 18 '10 at 01:19

Greg Hewgill

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Are you guys familiar with HtmlParser? Its in java? if so, I can post my issue that I am having. – Blankman Apr 18 '10 at 01:35
Post the question (as a new question of course!!!). I'm sure someone will be familiar enough to answer it. – Stephen C Apr 18 '10 at 01:44

Will this Java regex return a single result or multiple

1 Answers1