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Finding HTML Stuff with Regular Expressions

Following-up my post [cref 69], here’s what I used it for:

<tr\b[^>]*>([\s\S](?!tr\b[^>]*>))*?(String1|String2)[\s\S]*?</tr>

This is an excellent way to find a chunk of HTML with regex. It finds specific table rows containing either “String1″ or “String2″, regardless of linefeeds, carriage returns, or other nefarious forms of whitespace.

Adapted from one of the more simple incarnations in Steve Levithan’s post about evolving a regex to find innermost HTML elements. Could be more complete and/or efficient.. but at least this one is fairly easy (kinda) to understand.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 2nd, 2007 at 12:58 pm and is filed under How To, RegEx, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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2 Responses to “Finding HTML Stuff with Regular Expressions”

  1. Steve Says:
    September 3rd, 2007 at 11:25 pm

    Very cool. One minor suggestion is to change ([\s\S](?!tr\b[^>]*>))*? to ([\s\S](?</?!tr\b[^>]*>))*? so it will also match some corner cases like <tr>Str<b>String1</b></tr>

    Or is there something I’m missing?

  2. Steve Says:
    September 3rd, 2007 at 11:29 pm

    Oops, I screwed that up while entering the HTML entities. I meant to change it to ([\s\S](?!</?tr\b[^>]*>))*?

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