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iOliverC · Sep 16, 2004, 03:12 PM

Hey guys,

Say I have a document that looks like this:

Code:
this is text<hello>text</hello>

What I would like to do with regex, is be able to find anything outside of the < and >. So basically, I'd like to get find every piece of text outside of the <> tags.

Any regex string appreciated

Oliver

qyn · Sep 17, 2004, 05:56 AM

In perl, you can do something like this:

Code:
$text = "your full <html> text";

@chunks = split(/<.*?>/, $text);

Then @chunks will be an array of all text chunks in the document. In this case, "your full " and " text".

There's many other ways to do it of course, but it all depends on what you're planning on doing with the text. What are you're planning to do with the text?

geran · 11:21 AM

In Java you could do something like this

Code:
public class RegexTest {

public static void main(String[] args) {
  StringBuffer buf = new StringBuffer("this is text<hello>text</hello>");
  StringBuffer parsed;
  String exp = "(<[/]*\\s*)(.*?)(\\s*>)";
  Pattern p = Pattern.compile(exp);
  Matcher m = p.matcher(buf);
  /*replace matches with " "*/
  parsed = new StringBuffer(m.replaceAll(" "));
  System.out.println(parsed);
}

}

I have not tried the code above (but it should work

), Im not at home but I try to night and edit the code if it dont work as expected.

this peice of code will print "this is text text "

edit small typo.

smeger · Sep 17, 2004, 10:29 AM

If you're using regex.h in code, you can just search for the html tags instead. You'll get the index into the string at which the match is found, and the length of the match. From that, you can just grab the portion of the string that wasn't matched.

Match an html tag using this:
<[^>]+>[^<]+<[^>]+>

Depending on the options you use in regex, that may or may not catch tags that span multiple lines.