How to match an enclosing substring using regex in .NET

Question

I'm trying to match * in id=resultsStats>*<nobr> to extract the middle bit. This would match e.g. id=resultsStats>3<nobr> id=resultsStats>anything<nobr>

so I can extract the middle "3" or "anything" How do I do this in .NET regex or otherwise?

Obligatory link: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 — Andrew Savinykh, Jun 10 '11 at 22:22

ildjarn · Accepted Answer · 2011-06-11T20:01:27.043

3

(?<=id=resultsStats>).+?(?=<nobr>)

Use * instead of + if content is optional rather than required.

Example of use (F#):

open System.Text.RegularExpressions

let tryFindResultsStats input =
    let m = Regex.Match (input,
                         "(?<=id=resultsStats>).+?(?=<nobr>)",
                         RegexOptions.Singleline)
    if m.Success then Some m.Value else None

edited Jun 11 '11 at 20:01

answered Jun 10 '11 at 22:28

ildjarn

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 10 '11 at 22:25

0

I'm not a regex expert but something like this might work:

@"\>\*{1}\<"

This means "match a single asterisk between the lt/gt characters". You just need to make sure you escape the asterisk because it has special meaning in regular expressions.

Hope this helps!

answered Jun 10 '11 at 22:25

sakuntala

37
3

he is not trying to match an actual * – skajfes Jun 10 '11 at 22:34
1

Also, `>` and `<` do *not* need to be escaped, and `{1}` does nothing but clutter up the regex. – Alan Moore Jun 11 '11 at 03:34

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 10 '11 at 22:26

0

If you are looking to capture a * then you need to escape it with a backslash. Note that if you are doing this within a string it is safest to escape the backslash as well (Although technically \* isn't valid and will work)

"\\*"

answered Jun 10 '11 at 22:26

Guvante

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 10 '11 at 22:41

0

Try this:

using System;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace SO6312611
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main()
        {
            string input = "id=resultsStats>anything<nobr>";
            Regex r = new Regex("id=resultsStats>(?<data>[^<]*)<nobr>");
            Match m = r.Match(input);
            Console.WriteLine("Matched: >{0}<", m.Groups["data"]);
        }
    }
}

answered Jun 10 '11 at 22:41

Andrew Savinykh

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Why include data you don't care about in the match? Also, he said anything until ``, not anything until another arbitrary tag. – ildjarn Jun 10 '11 at 22:50

How to match an enclosing substring using regex in .NET

4 Answers4