html tags not matching in regex

Question

I have a string that contains an html document. I need to know if this string contains the substring <title>Anmelden - Text</title>. Unfortunately there are some new lines in the string, so that the string looks like this:

...
<title>
        Anmelden - Text
</title></head>
...

I have tried the following code:

var idx = html.search( /<title>\n*.*Anmelden.*\n*<\/title>/ );

But idx is always -1. If I remove the <title>and </title>the expression works.

I have used http://regexpal.com/ to verify my regex. There it works on my input.

What am I doing wrong?

Don't use a regex for this. Create a DOM element and add the HTML string to it. Then, you can manipulate it like any DOM element, i.e. use getElementsByTagName() to get the title. — Amal
– Amal, Commented Oct 6, 2014 at 8:09
Instead of searching for .*, use \s|\S or [^] or some such hack to match ANY character including newline. — user663031
– user663031, Commented Oct 6, 2014 at 8:16
@Avinash Your suggestion worked. If you post an answer instead of a comment I will gladly accept it. — Martin
– Martin, Commented Oct 6, 2014 at 8:30
@Amal Your suggestion will work of course, but I don't need anything else of the document. My suspicion would be that creating an html doc and looking for the title is much more overhead than the regex approach. Correct me please if I am wrong. — Martin
– Martin, Commented Oct 6, 2014 at 8:35

Avinash Raj · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-06 08:34:06Z

3

Use [\S\s]* instead of \n*.* and .*\n* because there may be a possibility of spaces after the newline character. Note that \n matches only the newline character but \s matches all the space characters including newline \n , carriage return \r, tab characters \t also.

<title>[\S\s]*?Anmelden[\S\s]*?<\/title>

edited Oct 6, 2014 at 8:34

answered Oct 6, 2014 at 8:10

Avinash Raj

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