javascript regex to match all custom commented out sections, but not other text

Question

Say I have a html doc like so:

<!--FOO-->
  some text
<!--BAR-->

some other text

<!--FOO-->
some more text
<!--BAR-->

How can I write a javascript regex that matches both cases of

<!--FOO-->anytext<!--BAR-->

but not the text in between ('some other text' in this case).

My regex that I thought would work is

/<!--FOO-->(.|\n)*<!--BAR-->/

but it catches the 'some other text' as well.

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:49

2

You need the non-greedy operator ?, like this:

/<!--FOO-->(.|\n)*?<!--BAR-->/

Demo

A slightly better version would be this, letting you actually capture the text between the comments:

/<!--FOO-->((?:\n|.)*?)<!--BAR-->/

Demo

That said, parsing HTML with regex rarely ends well... See here for the classic explanation of the problem. You are better off using a library, unless your parsing is limited to the very simple case in your question.

edited May 23 '17 at 11:49

Community

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answered Dec 18 '14 at 19:24

elixenide

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thanks. It is a very simple case on this occasion, and if it gets more complex i'll look into a library. – Steven Harlow Dec 18 '14 at 19:29

javascript regex to match all custom commented out sections, but not other text

1 Answers1