Regex help

[Frank Rizzo]

Hello, i am regex newbie. I want to extract text between 2 markers. I
want all the text that happens to be between <h2> and </h2>.

So far I got this:
<h2>.*</h2>

for this sample input:
<h2>hello</h2>
<h2>goodbye</h2>
<h2>wait</h2>

However, the regex also returns the markers, while I only want hello,
goodbye, wait.

I know I can Substring it, but I want to do it with regex alone.

Thanks.

 

[Miroslav Stampar]

I suppose that you have a problem with regex greediness. To kill the
greediness and turn on the laziness use:

<h2>.*?</h2>

Reference: http://www.regular-expressions.info/repeat.html

Frank Rizzo je napisao/la:

 

[Frank Rizzo]

I suppose that you have a problem with regex greediness. To kill the
greediness and turn on the laziness use:

<h2>.*?</h2>

You are the man. That was my next question, how to turn lazyness on (i
actually didn't know that it was called lazyness).

Thanks.

 

[Walter Wang [MSFT]]

Hi,

To capture the matched text inside the markers, you need to group it with
"()":

<h2>(.*?)</h2>


After you got the Match object, use its .Groups[1] to reference the first
group, use its .Value property to read the matched text.

You can also use named group, for example:

<h2>(?<the_header>.*?)</h2>


Then you can use the group name to reference it: .Groups["the_header"]


Hope this helps.


Regards,
Walter Wang ([email protected], remove 'online.')
Microsoft Online Community Support

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[Walter Wang [MSFT]]

Hi,

Please reply here to let us know if this post can be closed or not. Thanks.


Regards,
Walter Wang ([email protected], remove 'online.')
Microsoft Online Community Support

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[Frank Rizzo]

Hi,

Please reply here to let us know if this post can be closed or not. Thanks.

Walter,

For whatever strange reason, your example did not work, even though it
made sense. However, this pattern worked fine:

(?<=<h2>).*?(?=</h2>)

The post can be closed.

Regards and thanks.