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Question

I'm trying to use Outlook 2013 VBA to modify an email body by pulling out and replacing a section. However, with multiple spans, I'm having trouble forcing the regex to only pick up one span.

Based on some other searches, I'm trying to use negative lookahead, but failing at it.

Result from below is: Tags: test, test2

Desired result is: Tags: test, test2

Code for test module:

Sub regextest()
Dim regex As New RegExp
Dim testStr As String

testStr = "a<span><span style=blah blah>Tags: test, test2</span></span>"

regex.pattern = "<span.*?(?:(span)).*?Tags:.*?</span>"

Set matches = regex.Execute(testStr)

For Each x In matches
    Debug.Print x 'Result: <span><span style = blah blah>Tags: test, test2</span>
Next
End Sub

Thank you!

Wiktor--thanks. I'll give it a try in the morning. Comintern--I would not call what I'm doing "parsing HTML". I'm doing a find and replace on a fairly basic pattern. It just so happens that the document is in HTML. — Nathan Berton, Feb 07 '17 at 03:46

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 07 '17 at 14:19

Wiktor's answer in comments above works for my purposes:

<span\b[^<]*>[^<]*Tags:[^<]*

This works as long as there are no '<' between the two span ends. Not really a lookahead, but it's good enough for what I'm doing and very simple.

Thanks Wiktor!

Match shortest option

1 Answers1