Regexp HTML Parsing

[RedBassett]

I have some HTML tags I want to catch with a regexp, however I am having trouble matching the characters between the tags. I currently am trying to get all characters that don't match a string of the closing tag. Example below:

<a href="something"><h1>I am a tag!</h1></a>

If i want to get all the content of the "h1" element, I would say "[^<]*". This doesn't work, however for the "a" element, since the opening tag of the "h1" would cause the matching to stop. How do I instruct it to match everything up to "</a"?

[Chris]

Typically you use backreferences. I'm a tad rusty, but try something like this:

<(\w+).*?>(.*?)<\/\\1>

It might also be $1 instead of \\1 in JS. Can't recall.

[RedBassett]

May 2, 2012 6:56:04 GMT -8 Chris said:

Typically you use backreferences. I'm a tad rusty, but try something like this:

<(\w+).*?>(.*?)<\/\\1>

It might also be $1 instead of \\1 in JS. Can't recall.

So it turns out (.*?) was the trick. I think I had lazy/not-lazy wrong, as what I was using there was matching the closing tag as if it were child content. Just changing that part fixed it without needing backreferences.

Thanks!