regex question "match everything that does not include the string '<br>'

[Mark Maunder]

Hi,

I'm matching html using regex and use something like this to grab a
chunk of text up to the next html tag:

<font>([^<]+)</font>

But I'd like to say "match everything that does not include the string
<br>" rather than "match everything that does not include a "<"
character. Anyone got any suggestions?

Thanks,

Mark

[Jeff 'Japhy' Pinyan]

On Jan 26, Mark Maunder said:

>I'm matching html using regex and use something like this to grab a
>chunk of text up to the next html tag:
>
><font>([^<]+)</font>
>
>But I'd like to say "match everything that does not include the string
><br>" rather than "match everything that does not include a "<"
>character. Anyone got any suggestions?

First, I don't suggest using regexes to parse HTML.

What you want, though, is:

m{
<font>
( (?: [^<]+ | < (?!/font>) )* )
</font>
}

The middle part of that regex says "match either 'one or more non-<' or 'a
< that is not followed by /font' zero or more times".

--
Jeff "japhy" Pinyan [email]japhy@pobox.com[/email] [url]http://www.pobox.com/~japhy/[/url]
RPI Acacia brother #734 [url]http://www.perlmonks.org/[/url] [url]http://www.cpan.org/[/url]
<stu> what does y/// stand for? <tenderpuss> why, yansliterate of course.
[ I'm looking for programming work. If you like my work, let me know. ]

[Mark Maunder]

Thanks Jeff, that helps. I use HTML::Parser for various tasks, but for
this particular one, I need exact matching, hence the regex.

On Mon, 2004-01-26 at 09:57, Jeff 'japhy' Pinyan wrote:

> On Jan 26, Mark Maunder said:
>

> >I'm matching html using regex and use something like this to grab a
> >chunk of text up to the next html tag:
> >
> ><font>([^<]+)</font>
> >
> >But I'd like to say "match everything that does not include the string
> ><br>" rather than "match everything that does not include a "<"
> >character. Anyone got any suggestions?

>
> First, I don't suggest using regexes to parse HTML.
>
> What you want, though, is:
>
> m{
> <font>
> ( (?: [^<]+ | < (?!/font>) )* )
> </font>
> }
>
> The middle part of that regex says "match either 'one or more non-<' or 'a
> < that is not followed by /font' zero or more times".
>
> --
> Jeff "japhy" Pinyan [email]japhy@pobox.com[/email] [url]http://www.pobox.com/~japhy/[/url]
> RPI Acacia brother #734 [url]http://www.perlmonks.org/[/url] [url]http://www.cpan.org/[/url]
> <stu> what does y/// stand for? <tenderpuss> why, yansliterate of course.
> [ I'm looking for programming work. If you like my work, let me know. ]

--
Mark Maunder <mark@ziptree.com>
ZipTree.com