Help with regex html plus with extra string at the end

Question

I am trying to find HTML tags, via PHP ereg, that has a {xxx} right before the closing tag - where xxx can be [A-Za-z0-9_\-]*.

For example: xxxxyyyy{asdf}

This is the best I could come up with: /<([\w]+)([^>]?)>([^{]*)\{([^}]+)\}<\/\1>/is

The problem is though, that it will match group 3 will have xxxxyyyy, and I only want yyyy in this case.

Hope anybody can help, cheers, Egil.

Ps. Sorry for the useless title, could not think of anything better.

Never ever parse HTML with regex. Please check out DOMDocument from php.net — Mike Lewis, Mar 17 '11 at 03:29
@Mike You forgot the obligatory link - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 — Phil, Mar 17 '11 at 03:30
The `ereg_*` suite has been deprecated for years and soon to be removed. Please use the [PCRE functions](http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.pcre.php) — Phil, Mar 17 '11 at 03:32

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 17 '11 at 03:30

3

Add a ? after each + and * in your regex. This will make the match less greedy.

Else try adding <> to the negative character classes [^{<>]* and [^}<>]* to exclude tags in between there.

answered Mar 17 '11 at 03:30

mario

Thanks. Wont that exclude nested tags though? – Egil Hansen Mar 17 '11 at 07:29
Yes. I assumed that you only want text content there. – mario Mar 17 '11 at 07:30

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