Regular expressions in Java for HTML text formatting

Question

I need to write a regular expression for a HTML text block. What's making me sometrouble , is how to do it in a way that will check if the opening tag is the same as closing tag? What I have right now is:

"^(<b>*<i>*<u>*).*(</b>*</i>*</u>)$"

I'd also like to be able to input a text with multiple formatting (e.g. bold AND italic). Thanks in advance.

Regular expressions are not suitable for the job you're trying to do. Look for a library specifically designed for parsing HTML. — ajb, Dec 11 '14 at 21:29
The [obligatory](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags). — GriffeyDog, Dec 11 '14 at 21:30
But I need to do this as a laboratory exercise, specifically. — Michał Szydłowski, Dec 11 '14 at 21:32
@MichałSzydłowski You can't. As ajb said, regexes are **not** suitable for parsing HTML. You need to keep track of where a tag was open and the order of tags, which is a thing that regexes themselves cannot do. — BackSlash, Dec 11 '14 at 21:44
Why do you _need_ to do this with regexes? What exactly does the exercise require you to do? Does it require that you solve the whole thing with one regex, or can you use a regex to find each tag one at a time, and then perhaps keep the tags on a stack? — ajb, Dec 11 '14 at 22:39

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 11 '14 at 21:49

0

Please note HTML Parser is the correct way to do this task. But if you want to match some opening and closing tags then you can achieve it like this in java(replace Foo with your tag)

<Foo\\b[^>]*>(.*?)</Foo>

Demo

answered Dec 11 '14 at 21:49

sol4me

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Regular expressions in Java for HTML text formatting

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