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– SilentGhost2011-01-25 13:16:31 +00:00Commented Jan 25, 2011 at 13:16
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@SilentGhost what don't you understand?barlop– barlop2011-01-25 13:17:26 +00:00Commented Jan 25, 2011 at 13:17
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what problem do you have not using lazy evaluation?SilentGhost– SilentGhost2011-01-25 13:18:01 +00:00Commented Jan 25, 2011 at 13:18
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1don't use regex for html stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/…ant– ant2011-01-25 13:18:08 +00:00Commented Jan 25, 2011 at 13:18
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@SilentGhost I just want to not use lazy evaluation.barlop– barlop2011-01-25 13:19:15 +00:00Commented Jan 25, 2011 at 13:19
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1 Answer
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.
2 Comments
barlop
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.
Jens
@barlop: Thanks! I think regular-expression.info is the source to go to for all things regex.