How can I create a RegEx for Strings with Tabulator?

Question

I have an input string/text like this:

    <span id="salutation">


            Mister




</span><div class="c"></div>

With which pattern can I get the string Mister?

This pattern:

string pattern = "<span id=\"salutation\"> (.*) </span>";

have no success for me.

It may depend to your language, but more or less the pattern is `\s*(.*?)\s*` — logi-kal, Jun 04 '17 at 21:18
Thanks a lot! I'm using C#.NET. But if i use this pattern, the compiler says: not expected escapesequence — Brandon Baba, Jun 04 '17 at 21:28
You indeed have to escape it properly. Use `"\\s*(.*?)\\s*"` or `@"\s*(.*?)\s*"` — logi-kal, Jun 04 '17 at 21:35
@mickmackusa I was waiting for a positive response before posting a complete answer. — logi-kal, Jun 05 '17 at 09:18

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 05 '17 at 09:18

The correct regex is:

<span id="salutation">\s*(.*?)\s*</span>

which leaves out all the spaces (\s) around "Mister".

But, as in some other language, you have to double escape because of the slash:

"<span id=\"salutation\">\\s*(.*?)\\s*</span>"

In C# you can even use this trick:

@"<span id=""salutation"">\s*(.*?)\s*</span>"

Anyway, regex are not the best tool for this. Try to use an HTML parser (see What is the best way to parse html in C#? [closed]).

1 Answers1