I'd like to match everything between tags.
what's the regex to do that?
A bit like
<tr[^>]*>.*?</tr>
But I'd like to not use lazy evaluation.
I want to match each pair like the regex above, but not using lazy evaluation.
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so, don't! what is your question? – SilentGhost Jan 25 '11 at 13:16
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@SilentGhost what don't you understand? – barlop Jan 25 '11 at 13:17
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what problem do you have not using lazy evaluation? – SilentGhost Jan 25 '11 at 13:18
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1don't use regex for html http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 – ant Jan 25 '11 at 13:18
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@SilentGhost I just want to not use lazy evaluation. – barlop Jan 25 '11 at 13:19
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With lazy evaluation it works so using it to match html in this case of matching
tags is fine. without a parser being necessary. I just want to do it without lazy eval – barlop Jan 25 '11 at 13:20
1 Answers
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Instead of matching lazily, you could use a negative lookahead (if your flavour supports that). Your example would translate to
<tr[^>]*>((?!</tr>).)*</tr>
Of course, you should actually not use regex to parse HTML, as you might have guessed from the comments to your question. =) These expressions may fail horribly on nested tags, comments, and javascript.
Jens
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that is really an excellent use of negative lookahead - quite inspiring!.. is there any particular article or part of a book that inspired "((?!abc).)*?" and good closing paragraph too. – barlop Jan 26 '11 at 08:01
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@barlop: Thanks! I think regular-expression.info is the source to go to for all things regex. – Jens Jan 26 '11 at 08:22