How to get regex to match multiple script tags?

Question

I'm trying to return the contents of any tags in a body of text. I'm currently using the following expression, but it only captures the contents of the first tag and ignores any others after that.

Here's a sample of the html:

 <script type="text/javascript">
  alert('1');
 </script>

 <div>Test</div>

 <script type="text/javascript">
  alert('2');
 </script>

My regex looks like this:

//scripttext contains the sample
re = /<script\b[^>]*>([\s\S]*?)<\/script>/gm;
var scripts  = re.exec(scripttext);

When I run this on IE6, it returns 2 matches. The first containing the full tag, the 2nd containing alert('1').

When I run it on http://www.pagecolumn.com/tool/regtest.htm it gives me 2 results, each containing the script tags only.

Answer 1

Try using the global flag:

document.body.innerHTML.match(/<script.*?>([\s\S]*?)<\/script>/gmi)

Edit: added multiple line and case insensitive flags (for obvious reasons).

Answer 2

The first group contains the content of the tags.

Edit: Don't you have to surround the regex-satement with quotes? Like:

re = "/<script\b[^>]*>([\s\S]*?)<\/script>/gm";

Answer 3

In .Net, there's a submatch method, in PHP, preg_match_all, which should solve you problem. In Javascript there isn't such a method. But you can made by yourself.

Test in http://www.pagecolumn.com/tool/regtest.htm

Select $1elements method will return what you want

Answer 4

The "problem" here is in how exec works. It matches only first occurrence, but stores current index (i.e. caret position) in lastIndex property of a regex. To get all matches simply apply regex to the string until it fails to match (this is a pretty common way to do it):

var scripttext = ' <script type="text/javascript">\nalert(\'1\');\n</script>\n\n<div>Test</div>\n\n<script type="text/javascript">\nalert(\'2\');\n</script>';

var re = /<script\b[^>]*>([\s\S]*?)<\/script>/gm;

var match;
while (match = re.exec(scripttext)) {
  // full match is in match[0], whereas captured groups are in ...[1], ...[2], etc.
  console.log(match[1]);
}

Answer 5

Don't use regular expressions for parsing HTML. HTML is not a regular language. Use the power of the DOM. This is much easier, because it is the right tool.

var scripts = document.getElementsByTagName('script');