RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags

Question

I need to match all of these opening tags    lt p gt   lt a href  foo  gt    But not these    lt br   gt   lt hr class  foo    gt    I came up with this and wanted to make sure I ve got it right  I am only capturing the a-z    lt   a-z            gt    I believe it says    Find a less-than  then Find  and capture  a-z one or more times  then Find zero or more spaces  then Find any character zero or more times  greedy  except    then Find a greater-than   Do I have that right  And more importantly  what do you think

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The OP doesn t seem to say what he needs to do with the tags  For example  does he need to extract inner text  or just examine the tags  I m firmly in the camp that says a regular expression is not the be-all  end-all text parser  I ve written a large amount of text-parsing code including this code to parse HTML tags  While it s true I m not all that great with regular expressions  I consider regular expressions just too rigid and hard to maintain for this sort of parsing

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Don t listen to these guys  You totally can parse context-free grammars with regex if you break the task into smaller pieces  You can generate the correct pattern with a script that does each of these in order     Solve the Halting Problem  Square a circle  Work out the Traveling Salesman Problem in O log n  or less  If it s any more than that  you ll run out of RAM and the engine will hang  The pattern will be pretty big  so make sure you have an algorithm that losslessly compresses random data  Almost there - just divide the whole thing by zero  Easy-peasy    I haven t quite finished the last part myself  but I know I m getting close  It keeps throwing CthulhuRlyehWgahnaglFhtagnExceptions for some reason  so I m going to port it to VB 6 and use On Error Resume Next  I ll update with the code once I investigate this strange door that just opened in the wall  Hmm   P S  Pierre de Fermat also figured out how to do it  but the margin he was writing in wasn t big enough for the code

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I used a open source tool called HTMLParser before  It s designed to parse HTML in various ways and serves the purpose quite well  It can parse HTML as different treenode and you can easily use its API to get attributes out of the node  Check it out and see if this can help you

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As many people have already pointed out  HTML is not a regular language which can make it very difficult to parse  My solution to this is to turn it into a regular language using a tidy program and then to use an XML parser to consume the results  There are a lot of good options for this  My program is written using Java with the jtidy library to turn the HTML into XML and then Jaxen to xpath into the result

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The W3C explains parsing in a pseudo regexp form  W3C Link    Follow the var links for QName  S  and Attribute to get a clearer picture  Based on that you can create a pretty good regexp to handle things like stripping tags

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Try    lt     s     s   gt         lt     gt    It is similar to yours  but the last  gt  must not be after a slash  and also accepts h1

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If you re simply trying to find those tags  without ambitions of parsing  try this regular expression     lt        gt  g   I wrote it in 30 seconds  and tested here  http   gskinner com RegExr   It matches the types of tags you mentioned  while ignoring the types you said you wanted to ignore

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This may do    lt         gt    Or without the ending tags    lt             gt    What s with the flame wars on HTML parsers  HTML parsers must parse  and rebuild   the entire document before it can categorize your search  Regular expressions may be a faster   elegant in certain circumstances  My 2 cents

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It s true that when programming it s usually best to use dedicated parsers and APIs instead of regular expressions when dealing with HTML  especially if accuracy is paramount  e g   if your processing might have security implications   However  I don   t ascribe to a dogmatic view that XML-style markup should never be processed with regular expressions  There are cases when regular expressions are a great tool for the job  such as when making one-time edits in a text editor  fixing broken XML files  or dealing with file formats that look like but aren   t quite XML  There are some issues to be aware of  but they re not insurmountable or even necessarily relevant   A simple regex like  lt     gt                       gt  is usually good enough  in cases such as those I just mentioned  It s a naive solution  all things considered  but it does correctly allow unencoded  gt  symbols in attribute values  If you re looking for  e g   a table tag  you could adapt it as  lt   table b    gt                       gt    Just to give a sense of what a more  advanced  HTML regex would look like  the following does a fairly respectable job of emulating real-world browser behavior and the HTML5 parsing algorithm    lt     A-Za-z    s gt          s                       s gt        gt        gt       The following matches a fairly strict definition of XML tags  although it doesn t account for the full set of Unicode characters allowed in XML names     lt        A-Z  -   w       s    A-Z  -   w   s   s                       s         A-Z  -   w    s   gt    Granted  these don t account for surrounding context and a few edge cases  but even such things could be dealt with if you really wanted to  e g   by searching between the matches of another regex    At the end of the day  use the most appropriate tool for the job  even in the cases when that tool happens to be a regex

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I think this might work  lt  a-z    lt  gt              s       s        gt   And that could be tested here   As per W3Schools    XML Naming Rules XML elements must follow these naming rules   Names can contain letters  numbers  and other characters Names cannot start with a number or punctuation character Names cannot start with the letters xml  or XML  Xml  etc   Names cannot contain spaces Any name can be used  and no words are reserved    And the pattern I used is going to adhere these rules

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Whenever I need to quickly extract something from an HTML document  I use Tidy to convert it to XML and then use XPath or XSLT to get what I need  In your case  something like this      p a  href  foo

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I like to parse HTML with regular expressions  I don t attempt to parse idiot HTML that is deliberately broken  This code is my main parser  Perl edition        join  quot  quot   lt STDIN gt   tr  n r  t   s  s  lt   n lt  g  s  gt   gt  n g  s  n   n  n g  s     n  s  s     s  print  It s called htmlsplit  splits the HTML into lines  with one tag or chunk of text on each line  The lines can then be processed further with other text tools and scripts  such as grep  sed  Perl  etc  I m not even joking    Enjoy  It is simple enough to rejig my slurp-everything-first Perl script into a nice streaming thing  if you wish to process enormous web pages  But it s not really necessary  HTML Split  Some better regular expressions     lt     gt     lt     s  g      Get tags and text    w    quot       quot  g         Get attibutes  They are good for XML   XHTML  With minor variations  it can cope with messy HTML    or convert the HTML - gt  XHTML first   The best way to write regular expressions is in the Lex   Yacc style  not as opaque one-liners or commented multi-line monstrosities  I didn t do that here  yet  these ones barely need it

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lt  php  selfClosing   explode       area base basefont br col frame hr img input isindex link meta param embed      html      lt p gt  lt a href     gt foo lt  a gt  lt  p gt   lt hr  gt   lt br  gt   lt div gt name lt  div gt      dom   new DOMDocument     dom- gt loadHTML  html    els    dom- gt getElementsByTagName       foreach    els as  el          nodeName   strtolower  el- gt nodeName       if    in array   nodeName   selfClosing               var dump   nodeName              Output   string 4   html  string 4   body  string 1   p  string 1   a  string 3   div    Basically just define the element node names that are self closing  load the whole html string into a DOM library  grab all elements  loop through and filter out ones which aren t self closing and operate on them   I m sure you already know by now that you shouldn t use regex for this purpose

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You can t parse  X HTML with regex  Because HTML can t be parsed by regex  Regex is not a tool that can be used to correctly parse HTML  As I have answered in HTML-and-regex questions here so many times before  the use of regex will not allow you to consume HTML  Regular expressions are a tool that is insufficiently sophisticated to understand the constructs employed by HTML  HTML is not a regular language and hence cannot be parsed by regular expressions  Regex queries are not equipped to break down HTML into its meaningful parts  so many times but it is not getting to me  Even enhanced irregular regular expressions as used by Perl are not up to the task of parsing HTML  You will never make me crack  HTML is a language of sufficient complexity that it cannot be parsed by regular expressions  Even Jon Skeet cannot parse HTML using regular expressions  Every time you attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions  the unholy child weeps the blood of virgins  and Russian hackers pwn your webapp  Parsing HTML with regex summons tainted souls into the realm of the living  HTML and regex go together like love  marriage  and ritual infanticide  The  lt center gt  cannot hold it is too late  The force of regex and HTML together in the same conceptual space will destroy your mind like so much watery putty  If you parse HTML with regex you are giving in to Them and their blasphemous ways which doom us all to inhuman toil for the One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane  he comes  HTML-plus-regexp will liquify the n erves of the sentient whilst you observe  your psyche withering in the onslaught of horror  Rege   x-based HTML parsers are the cancer that is killing StackOverflow it is too late it is too late we cannot be saved the transgression of a chi ld ensures regex will consume all living tissue  except for HTML which it cannot  as previously prophesied  dear lord help us how can anyone survive this scourge using regex to parse HTML has doomed humanity to an eternity of dread torture and security holes using regex as a tool to process HTML establishes a breach between this world and the dread realm of c  o  rrupt entities  like SGML entities  but more corrupt  a mere glimpse of the world of reg ex parsers for HTML will ins tantly transport a programmer s consciousness into a world of ceaseless screaming  he comes  the pestilent slithy regex-infection wil l devour your HT ML parser  application and existence for all time like Visual Basic only worse he comes he comes do not fi ght he com e s   h i s un ho ly radian ce  destro ying all enli    ghtenment  HTML tags lea ki  n g fr o m  yo  ur eye s   l ik e liq uid pain  the song of re gular exp ression parsing will exti nguish the voices of mor tal man from the sp here I can see it can you see      i   t          it is beautiful t he final snuffing of the lie s of Man ALL IS LOS         T ALL I S LOST the pon y he comes he c  omes he comes the ich or permeates all MY FACE MY FACE  h god no NO NOO O O NT stop the an             g        l          e   s  a    r     e n ot re    a l         ZA    LG  IS          TO         TH E     P   O  N Y  H           E                        C          O      M          E         S            Have you tried using an XML parser instead    Moderator s Note This post is locked to prevent inappropriate edits to its content  The post looks exactly as it is supposed to look - there are no problems with its content  Please do not flag it for our attention

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Here s the solution    lt  php    here s the pattern   pattern      lt   w    s   w   s    s              4 s    s     gt   gt          a string to parse   string    Hello  try clicking  lt a href   paragraph  gt here lt  a gt       lt br  gt and check out  lt hr   gt       lt h2 gt title lt  h2 gt       lt a name   paragraph  rel   I  m an anchor  gt  lt  a gt      Fine   lt span title   highlight the  punch    gt thanks lt span gt        lt div class    clear  gt  lt  div gt       lt br gt        let s get the occurrences  preg match all  pattern   string   matches  PREG PATTERN ORDER       print the result  print r  matches 0      gt    To test it deeply  I entered in the string auto-closing tags like     lt hr   gt   lt br  gt   lt br gt    I also entered tags with    one attribute more than one attribute attributes which value is bound either into single quotes or into double quotes attributes containing single quotes when the delimiter is a double quote and vice versa  unpretty  attributes with a space before the     symbol  after it and both before and after it    Should you find something which does not work in the proof of concept above  I am available in analyzing the code to improve my skills    lt EDIT gt  I forgot that the question from the user was to avoid the parsing of self-closing tags  In this case the pattern is simpler  turning into this    pattern      lt   w    s   w   s    s              4 s    s  gt       The user  ridgerunner noticed that the pattern does not allow unquoted attributes or attributes with no value  In this case a fine tuning brings us the following pattern    pattern      lt   w    s   w    s    s               5 s      s  gt        lt  EDIT gt   Understanding the pattern  If someone is interested in learning more about the pattern  I provide some line    the first sub-expression   w   matches the tag name the second sub-expression contains the pattern of an attribute  It is composed by    one or more whitespaces  s  the name of the attribute   w   zero or more whitespaces  s   it is possible or not  leaving blanks here  the     symbol again  zero or more whitespaces the delimiter of the attribute value  a single or double quote        In the pattern  the single quote is escaped because it coincides with the PHP string delimiter  This sub-expression is captured with the parentheses so it can be referenced again to parse the closure of the attribute  that s why it is very important  the value of the attribute  matched by almost anything         in this specific syntax  using the greedy match  the question mark after the asterisk  the RegExp engine enables a  look-ahead -like operator  which matches anything but what follows this sub-expression here comes the fun  the  4 part is a backreference operator  which refers to a sub-expression defined before in the pattern  in this case  I am referring to the fourth sub-expression  which is the first attribute delimiter found zero or more whitespaces  s  the attribute sub-expression ends here  with the specification of zero or more possible occurrences  given by the asterisk   Then  since a tag may end with a whitespace before the   gt   symbol  zero or more whitespaces are matched with the  s  subpattern  The tag to match may end with a simple   gt   symbol  or a possible XHTML closure  which makes use of the slash before it          The slash is  of course  escaped since it coincides with the regular expression delimiter    Small tip  to better analyze this code it is necessary looking at the source code generated since I did not provide any HTML special characters escaping

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Here is a PHP based parser that parses HTML using  some ungodly regex  As the author of this project  I can tell you it is possible to parse HTML with regex  but not efficient  If you need a server-side solution  as I did for my wp-Typography WordPress plugin   this works

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Disclaimer  use a parser if you have the option  That said     This is the regex I use     to match HTML tags    lt                                   gt     gt    It may not be perfect  but I ran this code through a lot of HTML  Note that it even catches strange things like  lt a name  badgenerator   gt   which show up on the web   I guess to make it not match self contained tags  you d either want to use Kobi s negative look-behind    lt                                   gt       lt    s   gt    or just combine if and if not   To downvoters  This is working code from an actual product  I doubt anyone reading this page will get the impression that it is socially acceptable to use regexes on HTML    Caveat  I should note that this regex still breaks down in the presence of CDATA blocks  comments  and script and style elements  Good news is  you can get rid of those using a regex

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RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags All other tags  and content  are skipped   This regex does that  If you need to match only specific Open tags  make a list in an alternation    p br  lt whatever tags you want gt   and replace the   w    construct in the appropriate place below   lt           script style object embed applet noframes noscript noembed     s    gt  quot   S s    quot     S s             gt     gt         s  gt    S s    lt   1 s     gt    SKIP   FAIL        w    b        quot   S s    quot     S s        gt       gt   2   lt                w    s          w    s     quot   S s    quot     S s        gt      s         S s                DOCTYPE  S s          CDATA    S s            --  S s   --     ATTLIST  S s        ENTITY  S s        ELEMENT  S s         SKIP   FAIL   gt  https   regex101 com r uMvJn0 1    Mix html xml         https   regex101 com r uMvJn0 1          lt                  Invisible content gets failed                                                          Invisible content  end tag req d                                   1 start               script              style              object              embed              applet              noframes              noscript              noembed                                    1 end                              s                   gt                   quot    S s     quot                      S s                                                   gt                          gt                                                               s   gt                            S s     lt    1  s               gt             SKIP   FAIL                             This is any open html tag we will match                       w     b                                               2 start                                    quot    S s     quot                       S s                          gt                                                       2 end             gt                   2            lt                             All other tags get failed                              w     s                              w                s                               quot    S s     quot                    S s                       gt                             s                          S s                                                             DOCTYPE   S s                         CDATA     S s                            --   S s    --                    ATTLIST   S s                       ENTITY   S s                       ELEMENT   S s                                       SKIP   FAIL       gt

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If you only want the tag names  it should be possible to do this via a regular expression   lt   a-zA-Z         gt            gt   should do what you need  But I think the solution of  quot moritz quot  is already fine  I didn t see it in the beginning  For all downvoters  In some cases it just makes sense to use a regular expression  because it can be the easiest and quickest solution  I agree that in general you should not parse HTML with regular expressions  But regular expressions can be a very powerful tool when you have a subset of HTML where you know the format and you just want to extract some values  I did that hundreds of times and almost always achieved what I wanted

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It seems to me you re trying to match tags without a     at the end  Try this    lt   a-zA-Z  a-zA-Z0-9      gt      lt     gt

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Although it s not suitable and effective to use regular expressions for that purpose sometimes regular expressions provide quick solutions for simple match problems and in my view it s not that horrbile to use regular expressions for trivial works    There is a definitive blog post about matching innermost HTML elements written by Steven Levithan

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In shell  you can parse HTML using sed    Turing sed Write HTML parser  homework      Profit      Related  why you shouldn t use regex match     If You Like Regular Expressions So Much  Why Don t You Marry Them  Regular Expressions  Now You Have Two Problems Hacking stackoverflow com s HTML sanitizer

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lt  s   w      gt    gt   The parts explained   lt   Starting character  s   It may have whitespaces before the tag name  ugly  but possible     w    tags can contain letters and numbers  h1   Well   w also matches      but it does not hurt I guess  If curious  use   a-zA-Z0-9    instead      gt     Anything except  gt  and   until closing  gt   gt   Closing  gt  UNRELATED And to the fellows  who underestimate regular expressions  saying they are only as powerful as regular languages  anbanban which is not regular and not even context free  can be matched with   a  b 1b 1  Backreferencing FTW

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Here s a PCRE regular expression for XML XHTML  built from a simplified EBNF syntax definition       DEFINE     lt tag gt     amp tagempty       amp tagopen      amp textnode       amp tag       amp comment       amp tagclose      lt tagunnested gt     amp tagempty       amp tagopen      amp textnode       amp comment       amp tagclose      lt textnode gt     lt  gt        lt comment gt   lt  --   s S    -- gt      lt tagopen gt   lt     amp tagname     amp attrlist      amp ws    gt      lt tagempty gt   lt     amp tagname     amp ws      amp attrlist      amp ws      gt      lt tagclose gt   lt       amp tagname     amp ws    gt      lt attrlist gt      amp ws      amp attr        lt attr gt     amp attrunquoted       amp attrsinglequoted       amp attrdoublequoted       amp attrempty      lt attrempty gt     amp attrname      lt attrunquoted gt     amp attrname     amp ws        amp ws      amp attrunquotedvalue      lt attrsinglequoted gt     amp attrname     amp ws        amp ws        amp attrsinglequotedvalue        lt attrdoublequoted gt     amp attrname     amp ws        amp ws    quot     amp attrdoublequotedvalue   quot      lt tagname gt     amp alphabets      amp alphabets       amp digits        lt attrname gt    amp alphabets      amp alphabets     amp digits    -        lt attrunquotedvalue gt     s quot    lt  gt         lt attrsinglequotedvalue gt            lt attrdoublequotedvalue gt     quot        lt alphabets gt   a-zA-Z      lt digits gt   0-9      lt ws gt   s       amp tagopen   x  This illustrates how to build regular expressions for context-free grammars  You can match other parts of the definition by changing the match on the last line from    amp tagopen  to e g     amp tagunnested  The real question is  Should you do it  For XML XHTML the consensus is no  Credits to nikic for supplying the idea

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Sun Tzu  an ancient Chinese strategist  general  and philosopher  said      It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself  you can win a hundred battles without a single loss    If you only know yourself  but not your opponent  you may win or may lose    If you know neither yourself nor your enemy  you will always endanger yourself    In this case your enemy is HTML and you are either yourself or regex   You might even be Perl with irregular regex  Know HTML   Know yourself   I have composed a haiku describing the nature of HTML   HTML has complexity exceeding regular language    I have also composed a haiku describing the nature of regex in Perl   The regex you seek is defined within the phrase  lt   a-zA-Z         gt           gt

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About the question of the regular expression methods to parse  x HTML  the answer to all of the ones who spoke about some limits is  you have not been trained enough to rule the force of this powerful weapon  since nobody here spoke about recursion  A regular expression-agnostic colleague notified me this discussion  which is not certainly the first on the web about this old and hot topic  After reading some posts  the first thing I did was looking for the  quot  R quot  string in this thread  The second was to search about  quot recursion quot   No  holy cow  no match found  Since nobody mentioned the main mechanism a parser is built onto  I was soon aware that nobody got the point  If an  x HTML parser needs recursion  a regular expression parser without recursion is not enough for the purpose  It s a simple construct  The black art of regular expressions is hard to master  so maybe there are further possibilities we left out while trying and testing our personal solution to capture the whole web in one hand    Well  I am sure about it    Here s the magic pattern   pattern    quot   lt    w       gt         s     gt     gt       lt      lt    - -    - - gt     R     lt     1  s   gt    s quot    Just try it  It s written as a PHP string  so the  quot s quot  modifier makes classes include newlines  Here s a sample note on the PHP manual I wrote in January  Reference  Take care  In that note I wrongly used the  quot m quot  modifier  it should be erased  notwithstanding it is discarded by the regular expression engine  since no   or   anchoring was used   Now  we could speak about the limits of this method from a more informed point of view   according to the specific implementation of the regular expression engine  recursion may have a limit in the number of nested patterns parsed  but it depends on the language used although corrupted   x HTML does not drive into severe errors  It is not sanitized   Anyhow  it is only a regular expression pattern  but it discloses the possibility to develop of a lot of powerful implementations  I wrote this pattern to power the recursive descent parser of a template engine I built in my framework  and performances are really great  both in execution times or in memory usage  nothing to do with other template engines which use the same syntax

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While arbitrary HTML with only a regex is impossible  it s sometimes appropriate to use them for parsing a limited  known set of HTML     If you have a small set of HTML pages that you want to scrape data from and then stuff into a database  regexes might work fine   For example  I recently wanted to get the names  parties  and districts of Australian federal Representatives  which I got off of the Parliament s web site   This was a limited  one-time job     Regexes worked just fine for me  and were very fast to set up

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I don t know your exact need for this  but if you are also using  NET  couldn t you use Html Agility Pack   Excerpt      It is a  NET code library that allows   you to parse  out of the web  HTML   files  The parser is very tolerant   with  real world  malformed HTML

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There are some nice regexes for replacing HTML with BBCode here  For all you nay-sayers  note that he s not trying to fully parse HTML  just to sanitize it  He can probably afford to kill off tags that his simple  parser  can t understand   For example    store    s http  http      gi   store    s https  https      gi   baseurl    store   if    query- gt param  ascii           html    s  s s   n gi       html    s  lt pre      gt       lt   pre gt    code  2    code  sgmi      html    s  n  gi   html    s  r r  gi   html    s  baseurl  gi   html    s  lt h 1-7       gt       lt   h 1-7  gt   n  b  2    b  n sgmi   html    s  lt p gt   n n gi   html    s  lt br      gt   n gi   html    s  lt textarea      gt       lt   textarea gt    code  2    code  sgmi   html    s  lt b gt       lt   b gt    b  1    b  gi   html    s  lt i gt       lt   i gt    i  1    i  gi   html    s  lt u gt       lt   u gt    u  1    u  gi   html    s  lt em gt       lt   em gt    i  1    i  gi   html    s  lt strong gt       lt   strong gt    b  1    b  gi   html    s  lt cite gt       lt   cite gt    i  1    i  gi   html    s  lt font color         gt       lt   font gt    color  1  2    color  sgmi   html    s  lt font color       gt       lt   font gt    color  1  2    color  sgmi   html    s  lt link      gt   gi   html    s  lt li      gt       lt   li gt        2 gi   html    s  lt ul      gt    list  gi   html    s  lt   ul gt      list  gi   html    s  lt div gt   n gi   html    s  lt   div gt   n gi   html    s  lt td      gt    gi   html    s  lt tr      gt   n gi    html    s  lt img     src              gt    img  baseurl   2    img  gi   html    s  lt a     href              gt       lt   a gt    url  baseurl   2  4    url  gi   html    s   url  baseurl  http                    url    url http      1  2    url  gi   html    s   img  baseurl  http              img    img http      1    img  gi    html    s  lt head gt       lt   head gt   sgmi   html    s  lt object gt       lt   object gt   sgmi   html    s  lt script      gt       lt   script gt   sgmi   html    s  lt style      gt       lt   style gt   sgmi   html    s  lt title gt       lt   title gt   sgmi   html    s  lt  --     -- gt   n sgmi    html    s         gi   html    s http    http      gi   html    s https    https      gi    html    s  lt       gt                1   gt   gsi   html    s  r r  gi   html    s   img      img  gi   html    s   url      url  gi

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You want the first  gt  not preceded by a     Look here for details on how to do that   It s referred to as negative lookbehind   However  a na  ve implementation of that will end up matching  lt bar  gt  lt  foo gt  in this example document   lt foo gt  lt bar  gt  lt  foo gt    Can you provide a little more information on the problem you re trying to solve   Are you iterating through tags programatically

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If you need this for PHP   The PHP DOM functions won t work properly unless it is properly formatted XML  No matter how much better their use is for the rest of mankind   simplehtmldom is good  but I found it a bit buggy  and it is is quite memory heavy  Will crash on large pages    I have never used querypath  so can t comment on its usefulness    Another one to try is my DOMParser which is very light on resources and I ve been using happily for a while  Simple to learn  amp  powerful   For Python and Java  similar links were posted   For the downvoters - I only wrote my class when the XML parsers proved unable to withstand real use  Religious downvoting just prevents useful answers from being posted - keep things within perspective of the question  please

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There are people that will tell you that the Earth is round  or perhaps that the Earth is an oblate spheroid if they want to use strange words   They are lying  There are people that will tell you that Regular Expressions shouldn t be recursive  They are limiting you  They need to subjugate you  and they do it by keeping you in ignorance  You can live in their reality or take the red pill  Like Lord Marshal  is he a relative of the Marshal  NET class    I have seen the Underverse Stack Based Regex-Verse and returned with powers knowledge you can t imagine  Yes  I think there were an Old One or two protecting them  but they were watching football on the TV  so it wasn t difficult  I think the XML case is quite simple  The RegEx  in the  NET syntax   deflated and coded in base64 to make it easier to comprehend by your feeble mind  should be something like this  7L0HYBxJliUmL23Ke39K9UrX4HShCIBgEyTYkEAQ7MGIzeaS7B1pRyMpqyqBymVWZV1mFkDM7Z28 995777333nvvvfe6O51OJ ff z9cZmQBbPbOStrJniGAqsgfP358Hz8itn6Po9 3eIue3 Px7 3F 86enJ8  fHn64ujx7 t7vFuUd Dx65fHJ6dHW9 7fd t7fy 73Ye0v f0v Pv  JnTvureM3b169 OP7i9Ogyr5uiWt746u BBqc 8dXx86PP7tzU9mfQ9tWrL18d3UGnW z7nZ9htH y9NXrsy9fvPjq i5 46ss3p4z x3e8b452f9 x93a2HxIkH44PpgeFyPD6lMAEHUdbcn8ffTP9fdTrz 8rBPCe05Iv p9WsWF788Obl9MXJl0 PXnwONLozY747 t7x9k9l2z 4vv4kqo1  993  vf2kC5HtwNcxXH4aOf LRw2z9 v8WEz2LTZcpaV1TL 4c3h66ex2Xv95vjF0 PnX744PbrOm59ZVhso5UHYME dfj768H7e Yy5uQUydDAH9  4eR11wHbqdfPnFF6cv3ogq V23t  4z4620A13cSzd7O1s 77rpw ePft916c7 O jj2bNnT7e t 397  M9 ibA 7s6ZNnz76PP0 kT2rz Ts s 0NArvziYxVEZWxbm93xsrUfnlm rASN7Hf93u 97vvf 2Lx e89L7  FSXiz4Bkd hF5mVq9Yik7fcncft9350QCu efkr P6BfntEv z iX9c4eBrFz7wEwpB9P d9n9MfuM3yzt7Nzss0 nuJfbra3e4BvZFR7z07pj3s7O7uWJM8eCkme nuCPp88MfW6kDeH7 26PSTX8vu ePAAiO4LVp4zIPWC1t7O 8  pMX3rzo2KhL7 8s23T1 RhP0e vyvm8HbsdmPXYDVhtpdnAzJ1k1jeufOtUAM8ffP06Zcnb36fl6dPXh2f F6nRvruyHfMd9rgJp0Y gvsRx 6 ZUzfCtX4e5hTndGzp5jQo9e z s3p1 czAUMlts P3tz uo4tISd745uJxvb3 v4ZlWs mrjfd9SG swGPD 6 nh 9MF4brTBRmh1Tl5 9eT52ckt5oR0xldPzp7GR8pfuXf5PWJv4nJIwvbH W3c GY3vPvrs9zj8Xb 147 n7 b7  52DD2gsSH8zGDvH9 i9 fu PftTfTXYf5hB 9H7P1BeG52 MTtu4S2cTAjDizevv3ry vSNb8N 3  1po2anj4 hZsGt3TY4GmjYbEKDJ62 pHB 3 LmL62wdsU 1J18 eINzTJr3dMvXr75fX7m MXvY9XxF2e 9 nTgPu2bgwh5U0f7u 74y9Pnh6 OX4PlA2UlwTn xenJG8L996VhbP3  PCrV68QkrjveITxr2TIt lL f3k22fPn 6I6f fMqZvqXN K4Xps6sazUGZ GeQlar49xEvajzI35VRevDl78 sc b7f6jkG8Va x52N4L9lBe kZSh1hr9fPj19 ebbR4AifyuY 12efv5CgGh9TroR6Pj2l748iYxYgN8Z7pr0HzRLg66FnRvcjUft 45i pRP08vTV6TOe2N 9jv37 R9P0 5YxbXQDeK5E9R12XdDA 4zop  9Ht 65PtsDVlBBUqko986WsDoWqvbPD2gH T01DAC1NVn 3 uZ0feZ T77fd GVMkA4KjeMcg6RcvQLRl8HyPaWVStdv17PwHV0bOB9xUh7rfMp5Zu3icBJp25 D6f0NhayHyfI3HXHY6YYCw7Pz17fEFhQKzS6ZWChrX kUf7fMqavHViEPPKjCf1 y5hukcyPTvjP mHQCppRDN4nbVFPaT8 ekpV5 TP8g 79mVPo77PT1 LL7 MzL7548 XvdfritflFY00fxIsvSQPS mvctdYZpbt7vxKRfj3018OvC hEf 79lTBvM3debWj b8KO0wP 3OeM2aYHumuCAGonmCrxw9cVX X1C2d4P uSU7eoBUMzI3 f9udjbYl el04dI7s8fan8dWRjm6gFx NrKeFP WX0CxBdPT58df X8 DaWLX53 xFdnr06f szv  NnX7x8fnb6NAhIwsbPkPS7iSUQAFETvP2Tx8  Og0Xt yBvDn9vd c etno8S 81QKXptq ffzKZFZ 4e 743e8zxino 8RX37 k595h5 H28 y7fPv490hQdJ349E txB3 zPZ5J jsR8bs y1j2hh 2fkayOqEmYcej0cXUWMN7QrqBwjDrVZRfyQM3xjj EgYvo4wfLTZrnVS ebdKq0XSZJvzajKQDUv1 P3NwbEP7cN5 Odivv9 ysPfhHfkOP6b9Fl 91v7LD9aCvp  Zi 7lLQ j0zwNzYFP  Y6r1NcFeDbfBIo8rug3zS3 3WPumPlN3 y8f0I2X3cz4FP  Y6htSdr2I42fEuSPX  ewpL4e9 n1evzn94hb Plpw2 dnbyh79zx0CsPvbq0lb UQ h7xvqPq Gc24PnR18fzVrp8I57d mehj7ebk5VdPnp d3GJOSP189eTsaXyk JV7l98j4SAZgRxtf7x155PR O6jz36Pw9 1Wz  e 5u v  vbsfQAxobws8M9v7xLXp 785 395ED4nO1wx5fsTeH4LnRva eYY8rpZUBFb j jfm8XAvfEj 4 b ljF1F9B jx5PhAkp1nu  y3n kdZp 93jWmjJ M11TG  VEG6puZn593PPejoOyHMQU 79jq GwrKfpSB tmcwZ93XPkjZffDmIKfd2z1DSm7bmCoPPmjBNT74XkrVf71I Sf6wTU7XJA4RB lIC6 mW1 xN5GWw1 683C5rnj m364cmr45Pf6 SN9H4Us4LISn355vjN2ZcvtDGT6fHvapJcMISmxc0K MAD4IyP6 5Yx SwkP360FvD1VTH191mURr HUY 2P3I9boPnz7Ju pHrcWPnP3I9 r L3sN0v52z 0fEgNrgbL8 Evfh9fw q5Xf93u 97vvf 2Lx e89L7  Fe3iZ37f34P5h178kTfx 5YxfUs8vY26 7 d4 OWbb5  ogn7PX5XzOHtOP3GrsHmqobOVO 8Hh1Gk TPl198QS6w rLb23fcZ0fMaTfjsv29 7Zul7me2v0FgRoYVURnf9nZEkDD H2VDf8hjeq8xff1s6GbButNLacEtefHm9VdPXp  CRTw7 v9 r6vW8b9eJ0  PIHzs1HHdyKE x9L4Y s2f PJPX 1dbsJn3wrY6wiqv85vjVm9Pnp DgN8efM5va j794 eb36Xz3mAf5 58 f3r68s230dRvJcxKn l  oh3f 7H9K2O0r05PXf85s2rH83f 1vGdAvd w qBFqsoWvzspozD77EpXYeZ7yzdfxy0ec l 8e 8FbR84 Wd78xbvn qQQMz J7L  GPB7N0MQa 2vTMBwjDrVI0PxKGb4xxfiQMX0cYPuq Fbx2C1sU8yEF F34iNsx1xOGa9t6l yX70uqmxu qBGm AxlxWwVS11O97ULqlsFIUvUnT4 fHIuL  3f9 t9J39Y9m8W Tuc296yUeX b0PiHwUeP1801Y8C j 9vz9 PAo8f Vq35Jb n0rAz7Kv9aPA40fC8P RMf3sC8PP08DjR1L3DXHoj6SuIz CCghZNZb8 fb Hf 2 37tjvuBY9vu3jmRvxNeGgQAuaAF6Pwj8  e66M8 7rwpRNj6uVwXZRl52k0n3FVl95Q   fz0KSu73 dtkGDYdvZgSP5uskadrtViRKyal2IKAiQfiW FI tET 9 Txj9SFf8SFf8rOuKzagx  r vD34mUADO1P4 AQAA  8   The options to set is RegexOptions ExplicitCapture  The capture group you are looking for is ELEMENTNAME  If the capture group ERROR is not empty then there was a parsing error and the Regex stopped  If you have problems reconverting it to a human-readable regex  this should help  static string FromBase64 string str        byte   byteArray   Convert FromBase64String str        using  var msIn   new MemoryStream byteArray       using  var msOut   new MemoryStream              using  var ds   new DeflateStream msIn  CompressionMode Decompress                 ds CopyTo msOut                      return Encoding UTF8 GetString msOut ToArray              If you are unsure  no  I m NOT kidding  but perhaps I m lying   It WILL work  I ve built tons of unit tests to test it  and I have even used  part of  the conformance tests  It s a tokenizer  not a full-blown parser  so it will only split the XML into its component tokens  It won t parse integrate DTDs  Oh    if you want the source code of the regex  with some auxiliary methods  regex to tokenize an xml or the full plain regex

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I suggest using QueryPath for parsing XML and HTML in PHP   It s basically much the same syntax as jQuery  only it s on the server side

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I think the flaw here is that HTML is a Chomsky Type 2 grammar  context free grammar  and a regular expression is a Chomsky Type 3 grammar  regular grammar   Since a Type 2 grammar is fundamentally more complex than a Type 3 grammar  see the Chomsky hierarchy   it is mathematically impossible to parse XML with a regular expression  But many will try  and some will even claim success - but until others find the fault and totally mess you up

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While the answers that you can t parse HTML with regexes are correct  they don t apply here  The OP just wants to parse one HTML tag with regexes  and that is something that can be done with a regular expression   The suggested regex is wrong  though    lt   a-z            gt    If you add something to the regex  by backtracking it can be forced to match silly things like  lt a  gt  gt        is too permissive  Also note that  lt space gt        is redundant  because the       can also match spaces   My suggestion would be   lt   a-z      gt      lt     gt    Where    lt         is  in Perl regexes  the negative look-behind  It reads  a  lt   then a word  then anything that s not a    the last of which may not be a    followed by      Note that this allows things like  lt a   gt   just like the original regex   so if you want something more restrictive  you need to build a regex to match attribute pairs separated by spaces

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I agree that the right tool to parse XML and especially HTML is a parser and not a regular expression engine  However  like others have pointed out  sometimes using a regex is quicker  easier  and gets the job done if you know the data format   Microsoft actually has a section of Best Practices for Regular Expressions in the  NET Framework and specifically talks about Consider ing  the Input Source   Regular Expressions do have limitations  but have you considered the following   The  NET framework is unique when it comes to regular expressions in that it supports Balancing Group Definitions    See Matching Balanced Constructs with  NET Regular Expressions See  NET Regular Expressions  Regex and Balanced Matching See Microsoft s docs on Balancing Group Definitions   For this reason  I believe you CAN parse XML using regular expressions  Note however  that it must be valid XML  browsers are very forgiving of HTML and allow bad XML syntax inside HTML   This is possible since the  Balancing Group Definition  will allow the regular expression engine to act as a PDA   Quote from article 1 cited above       NET Regular Expression Engine      As described above properly balanced constructs cannot be described by   a regular expression  However  the  NET regular expression engine   provides a few constructs that allow balanced constructs to be   recognized              lt group gt   - pushes the captured result on the capture stack with   the name group       lt -group gt   - pops the top most capture with the name group off the   capture stack       group yes no  - matches the yes part if there exists a group   with the name group otherwise matches no part          These constructs allow for a  NET regular expression to emulate a   restricted PDA by essentially allowing simple versions of the stack   operations  push  pop and empty  The simple operations are pretty much   equivalent to increment  decrement and compare to zero respectively    This allows for the  NET regular expression engine to recognize a   subset of the context-free languages  in particular the ones that only   require a simple counter  This in turn allows for the non-traditional    NET regular expressions to recognize individual properly balanced   constructs    Consider the following regular expression       lt ul s id  matchMe  s type  square  s  gt      gt      lt  --     -- gt                         lt    gt     gt                               lt opentag gt  lt         gt        gt            lt -opentag gt  lt     gt        gt               lt  gt          opentag         Use the flags    Singleline IgnorePatternWhitespace  not necessary if you collapse regex and remove all whitespace  IgnoreCase  not necessary    Regular Expression Explained  inline       lt ul s id  matchMe  s type  square  s  gt     match start with  lt ul id  matchMe        gt                                           atomic group   don t backtrack  faster      lt  --     -- gt                               match xml   html comment     lt    gt     gt                                   self closing tag       lt opentag gt  lt         gt        gt                push opening xml tag       lt -opentag gt  lt     gt        gt                   pop closing xml tag       lt  gt                                       something between tags                                              match as many xml tags as possible    opentag                                   ensure no  opentag  groups are on stack   You can try this at A Better  NET Regular Expression Tester   I used the sample source of    lt html gt   lt body gt   lt div gt      lt br   gt      lt ul id  matchMe  type  square  gt         lt li gt stuff    lt  li gt         lt li gt more stuff lt  li gt         lt li gt             lt div gt                  lt span gt still more lt  span gt                  lt ul gt                       lt li gt Another  amp gt ul amp lt   oh my  lt  li gt                       lt li gt     lt  li gt                  lt  ul gt             lt  div gt         lt  li gt      lt  ul gt   lt  div gt   lt  body gt   lt  html gt    This found the match       lt ul id  matchMe  type  square  gt         lt li gt stuff    lt  li gt         lt li gt more stuff lt  li gt         lt li gt             lt div gt                  lt span gt still more lt  span gt                  lt ul gt                       lt li gt Another  amp gt ul amp lt   oh my  lt  li gt                       lt li gt     lt  li gt                  lt  ul gt             lt  div gt         lt  li gt      lt  ul gt    although it actually came out like this    lt ul id  matchMe  type  square  gt             lt li gt stuff    lt  li gt             lt li gt more stuff lt  li gt             lt li gt                 lt div gt                      lt span gt still more lt  span gt                      lt ul gt                           lt li gt Another  amp gt ul amp lt   oh my  lt  li gt                           lt li gt     lt  li gt                      lt  ul gt                 lt  div gt             lt  li gt          lt  ul gt    Lastly  I really enjoyed Jeff Atwood s article   Parsing Html The Cthulhu Way  Funny enough  it cites the answer to this question that currently has over 4k votes

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