Regular Expression to capture the first <p> of HTML

Question

I have the following regular expression:

(?:<(?<tag>\w*)>(?<text>.*)</\k<tag>>)

I want it t grab the text within the first HTML element.

eg.

<p>This should capture</p>This shouldn't

Works, but ...

<p>This should capture</p><p>This shouldn't</p>

Doesn't work. As you'd expect, it returns:

This should capture</p><p>This shouldn't

I'm racking my brains here. How can I just have it select the FIRST inner text?

(I'm trying to be tag-agnostic, so <strong>This should match</strong> is equally appropriate, etc.)

Answer 1

You should use the HTML Agility Pack.

For example:

doc.DocumentNode.Descendants("p").First().InnerText

Answer 2

In order to have a non-greedy * selection, you should add an ? after the *.

(?:<(?<tag>\w*)>(?<text>.*?)</\k<tag>>)

Answer 3

Stop. Just stop. If you are parsing HTML, use an HTML parser (or XML if you're dealing with valid XHTML). See this answer for more info.