Regular expression trouble

Question

I've been struggling with getting a working regular expression for a little project of mine. Can anyone help me with a regex that matches anything inside <> symbols, but only when they are not preceded by a \ symbol?

For example:

<Escaped characters \<\> are right in the middle of this sentence.>, <Here is another sentence.>

Must match

1: Square brackets \<\> are right in the middle of this sentence.
2: here is another sentence.

So far I've managed

/<([^\\][^>]*?)>/ig

but that gives

1: Escaped characters \<\
2: Here is another sentence.

What am I doing wrong? :(

Answer 1

What you need are look-behind operators. Read about them here:

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/07/01/regexps.html

And here is the expression you need:

/<(?!<\\).*>(?!<\\)/

As the * operator above is greedy, it should include any escaped angle brackets /< />

EDIT: I am assuming that you want escaped angle brackets to be matched and returned. If you want something different, please clarify - give a succinct example of a) the input string and b) the match to be returned

Answer 2

Try this

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

Answer 3

I would use this:

/<((?:[^\\>]+|\\.)*)>/