matching regex ignoring whitespace and new lines

Question

I have an xml string that looks something like

<parent><child>value</child></parent>

I’m trying to write a regular expression that matches this string. Trick is, sometimes the input has random new lines and spaces in it.

For example:

<parent>
    <child>value</child></parent>

I’d like to be able to identify using regex if the input xml has a parent, child and value.

So far I’ve tried:

“<parent>\n\s*<child>value<\/child>”

But this doesn’t seem to match. I don’t understand how to ignore ALL whitespace and ALL new lines in my expression.

SOLUTION: So when you are working with older systems, in healthcare tools for example you may often need to match xml requests and it's very much possible... through trial and error here's what worked for me:

^<parent>\s*<child>value[\S\s]*

[https://regex101.com/r/58j84v/1](https://regex101.com/r/58j84v/1) may be — Jose Ricardo Bustos M., Dec 19 '16 at 20:37

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 19 '16 at 20:33

You should not parse XML with a regular expression. Instead use an XML parser, which is available in JavaScript:

var sMyString = '<parent><child>value</child></parent>';
var oDOM = new DOMParser().parseFromString(sMyString, "text/xml"); 
var txt = oDOM.documentElement.textContent;
console.log(txt);

This parser knows how to deal with white space. Note that white space can also occur in the tags, like <parent >

matching regex ignoring whitespace and new lines

1 Answers1