HTML tags - ignore nested

O

onez

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Joined
Mar 10, 2006
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Lets say you have a HTML tables nested in each other but you want the whole table (ignoring the inner child's end tags) how do you do this.

this doesn't work:
<table(.)*?(<table(.)*?</table>)*(.)*?</table>

Example
sdfsdfsd<table> lskdjfsd<table>dsklfj</table>sldkfj</table>asdfsd
 
onez said:
Lets say you have a HTML tables nested in each other but you want the whole table (ignoring the inner child's end tags) how do you do this.

this doesn't work:
<table(.)*?(<table(.)*?</table>)*(.)*?</table>

Example
sdfsdfsd<table> lskdjfsd<table>dsklfj</table>sldkfj</table>asdfsd
Click to expand...

Your example shows the nested tags as being on the same line. If you set your options so that ^ matches the beginning of a line, then this should work:

^[^<]*(<.*>).*

Good Luck!
 
Solution

I think this is the solution, modified it from an expression that ignored nested parenthesis.

<table>(?>[^<>]+|<table>(?<DEPTH>)|</table>(?<-DEPTH>))*(?(DEPTH)(?!))</table>

Come on man, why would I be searching for HTML tables on one line?
 
onez said:
I think this is the solution, modified it from an expression that ignored nested parenthesis.

<table>(?>[^<>]+|<table>(?<DEPTH>)|</table>(?<-DEPTH>))*(?(DEPTH)(?!))</table>
Click to expand...
It seems like (<table>)(.*)(</table>) should work if you set the dot to match newlines. Since the RegEx is greedy it should then grab everything. I added the parentheses in case you needed to only work with the stuff inside the outside tags.

As an aside, have you ever been to www.RegExBuddy.com? Fabulous tool for $30 US and it is exceedingly rare for email support to be more than 24 hours.
 
Get the page's html and then use an xml parser instead of regular expressions. I've done it before in php and it worked pretty well :P
 
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