Regex to get text within text and ignore text with the format

Question

Imagine I have the following text: This is a text

If I only want to get "This is a text", then the regular expression will be:

(?<=\<tag\>).*(?=\<\/tag\>)

Imagine now that the text is something like:

<tag> <Arial>This is a text<Arial></tag>

What would be now the regular expression that gets "This is a text" and ignores everything else? The word Arial may not be fixed and varies.

Thanks in advance.

Something like `(?<=>)(?!\s+<)[^<>]*(?=<)`, but in real life, you'd rather use a HTML/XML parser. — Wiktor Stribiżew, Apr 03 '19 at 22:36
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 — Abdallatif Sulaiman, Apr 03 '19 at 22:37

logi-kal · Answer 1 · 2019-04-03T22:41:32.623

0

It depends to the regex flavour. If your regexps allows backreferences, you can go with:

\<(\w+)\>([^<>]*)\<\/\1\>

and \1 will refer to the content of (\w+).

In this case, the text "This is a text" will be matched by group 2 (see demo).

Notice that in most of flavors you cannot use the + inside lookbekind.

Otherwise, you have to be more broad and use something like:

(?<=\>)[^<>]*(?=\<)

In any case, probably the best solution is to use a DOM parser.

edited Apr 03 '19 at 22:41

answered Apr 03 '19 at 22:36

logi-kal

Thanks for the answers but I really have to detect the which is outermost, and ignore the inner tag . – José Cohen Abolnik Apr 03 '19 at 22:44
If you want to force the presence of the tag "" , just wrap the above regex with lookaround (something like [this](https://regex101.com/r/0uVz1Q/1)) – logi-kal Apr 03 '19 at 22:47
no match in your example. And that example really looks extremely complex :( I really need to force the existence of ""... – José Cohen Abolnik Apr 03 '19 at 22:49
I updated it. It is complex because this is not a job for regular expressions. – logi-kal Apr 03 '19 at 22:50

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