Very simple regular expression question (ASP/VBScript)

[Ken Fine]

I need a regular expression pattern that will match repeating "leafs" of XML
individually, e.g.

<link LinkName="Link1" LinkURL="http://www.link1.com"
LinkDescription="Description" />
<link LinkName="Link2" LinkURL="http://www.link1.com"
LinkDescription="Description" />
<link LinkName="Link3"" LinkURL="http://www.link1.com"
LinkDescription="Description" />

A pattern like "<link>.* />" does not work: it grabs all three as one long
strong. I want a pattern that will match just one of these XML nodes at a
time.

I'm working in ASP VBScript and will be building a collection of matches
using ASP's regex object, but that shouldn't matter.

Any help out there? Thanks in advance.

-KF

[Ken Fine]

Answering my own question, regular expressions support the notion of
"greediness". A non-greedy regex pattern will match as little as possible,
where as the default greedy behavior will match as much as it possibly can,
which I don't want.

Non-greediness is denoted by a question mark. See this example of how to
match each string individually below:

objMasterString.Pattern = "<class:.*?</class>"

This link from 4guys is an excellent series on regexs -- the articles go
well beyond the usual simple pattern matching and search-and-replacing
that's described in most articles:
[url]http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/120400-1.2.shtml[/url]

-KF



"Ken Fine" <kenfine@u.washington.edu> wrote in message
news:d05ntj$h7l$1@forums.macromedia.com...

> I need a regular expression pattern that will match repeating "leafs" of

XML

> individually, e.g.
>
> <link LinkName="Link1" LinkURL="http://www.link1.com"
> LinkDescription="Description" />
> <link LinkName="Link2" LinkURL="http://www.link1.com"
> LinkDescription="Description" />
> <link LinkName="Link3"" LinkURL="http://www.link1.com"
> LinkDescription="Description" />
>
> A pattern like "<link>.* />" does not work: it grabs all three as one long
> strong. I want a pattern that will match just one of these XML nodes at a
> time.
>
> I'm working in ASP VBScript and will be building a collection of matches
> using ASP's regex object, but that shouldn't matter.
>
> Any help out there? Thanks in advance.
>
> -KF
>
>

[Julian Roberts]

Why not load the XML into DOM? Then read the required nodes into a
collection using Xpath. Sample code

Set objXML = Server.CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM")
objXML.validateOnParse=True
objXML.async = False
objXML.load(Server.MapPath("xml/cart.xml"))
set objNodeXML=objXML.documentElement
set CartColumns=objNodeXML.selectSingleNode("CartColum ns")
Set objXML = Nothing


--
Jules
[url]http://www.charon.co.uk/charoncart[/url]
Charon Cart 3
Shopping Cart Extension for Dreamweaver MX/MX 2004