Regular Expression: Start from second one

Question

I want to find the second <BR> tag and to start the search from there. How can i do it using regular expressions?

<BR>like <BR>Abdurrahman<BR><SMALL>Fathers Name</SMALL>

Answer 1

The usual solution to this sort of problem is to use a "capturing group". Most regular expression systems allow you to extract not only the entire matching sequence, but also sub-matches within it. This is done by grouping a part of the expression within ( and ). For instance, if I use the following expression (this is in JavaScript; I'm not sure what language you want to be working in, but the basic idea works in most languages):

var string = "<BR>like <BR>Abdurrahman<BR><SMALL>Fathers Name</SMALL>";
var match = string.match(/<BR>.*?<BR>([a-zA-Z]*)/);

Then I can get either everything that matched using match[0], which is "<BR>like <BR>Abdurrahman", or I can get only the part inside the parentheses using match[1], which gives me "Abdurrahman".

Answer 2

assuming you are using PHP, you can split your string on <BR> using explode

$str='<BR>like <BR>Abdurrahman<BR><SMALL>Fathers Name</SMALL>';
$s = explode("<BR>",$str,3);
$string = end($s);
print $string;

output

$  php test.php
Abdurrahman<BR><SMALL>Fathers Name</SMALL>

you can then use "$string" variable and do whatever you want.

The steps above can be done with other languages as well by using the string splitting methods your prog language has.

Answer 3

Prepend <BR>[^<]*(?=<BR>) to your regex, or remove the lookahead part if you want to start after the second <BR>, such as: <BR>[^<]*<BR>.

Find text after the second <BR> but before the third: <BR>[^<]*<BR>([^<]*)<BR>

This finds "waldo" in <BR>404<BR>waldo<BR>.

Note: I specifically used the above instead of the non-greedy .*? because once the above starts not working for you, you should stop parsing HTML with regex, and .*? will hide when that happens. However, the non-greedy quantifier is also not as well-supported, and you can always change to that if you want.

Answer 4

this regular expression should math the first two <br />s:

/(\s*<br\s*/?>\s*){2}/i

so you should either replace them with nothing or use preg_match or RegExp.prototype.match to extract the arguments.

In JavaScript:

var afterReplace = str.replace( /(\s*<br\s*\/?>\s*){2}/i, '' );

In PHP

$afterReplace = preg_replace( '/(\s*<br\s*\/?>\s*){2}/i', '', $str );

I'm only sure it'll work in PHP / JavaScript, but it should work in everything...