Regex with < and >

Question

ok i have a file that may or may not be newlined or carriage fed. frankly i need to ignore that. I need to search the document find all the < and matching > tags and remove everything inside them. I've been trying to get this to work for a bit my current regex is:

private Regex BracketBlockRegex = new Regex("<.*>", RegexOptions.Singleline);
....
resultstring = BracketBlockRegex.Replace(filecontents, "");

but this doesn't seem to be working because it catches WAY to much. any clues? is there something wierd with the < and > symbols in c#?

Answer 1

Replace

<.*>

with

<.*?>

Answer 2

Try:

private Regex BracketBlockRegex = new Regex("<.*?>", RegexOptions.Singleline);

Answer 3

Try a non-greedy variant of your regex:

<[^>]*>

What you have, <.*>, will match the first < followed by everything up to the last >, whereas what you want is to match to the first one.

Answer 4

Regular expressions are greedy and you've got a period which equates to ANYTHING which just so happens to include the greater than and less than characters.

Try this...

<[^<>]*>

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