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Answer 1

+1 A:

(?:<b>PaintTitle<\/b>).*<b>(.*)<\/b>

Match group 1 is "The new great album by Pet Shop Boys" with that expression.

Ian C. 2010-03-13 02:31:46

Thanks Ian, I will give it a try now.

Joan Venge 2010-03-13 02:33:30

m.Groups [0].Value returns the whole string. Not just "The new great album by Pet Shop Boys", do you know why?

Joan Venge 2010-03-13 02:43:31

m.Groups[1] also returns the wrong result. It returns a sample way ahead of the stream. Can we make it so that it matches the first <b> after the album title?

Joan Venge 2010-03-13 03:19:12

@Joan Venge: I tested it in Perl against your string and it was okay for me. I'd need to see more of the stream to give you a better expression. I'll also echo what the comments to your question say: why do this with a regular expression? It's making things harder than they should be.

Ian C. 2010-03-13 03:37:13

Thanks, the reason I use regex is, I just need a dumb string parser that gives me a list of values from a stream. Do you mean there are better ways for this? It's nothing like a compiler thing though.

Joan Venge 2010-03-13 04:43:23

Replace the .* with the non-greedy version: .*? and it might work better for you.

Ian C. 2010-03-13 13:35:17

Thanks Ian. Now it works.

Joan Venge 2010-03-13 17:20:11

Answer 2

+1 A:

If you insist on using regex, you can try this instead:

(?:<b>PaintTitle<\/b>).*?<b>(.*?)<\/b>

polygenelubricants 2010-03-13 03:26:23

Thanks, this worked great.

Joan Venge 2010-03-13 04:43:40

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