How to write this Regex

Question

HTML:

<dt>
    <a href="#profile-experience" >Past</a>
</dt>
<dd>
    <ul class="past">
        <li>
            President, CEO &amp; Founder <span class="at">at</span> China Connection
        </li>
        <li>
            Professional Speaker and Trainer <span class="at">at</span> Edgemont Enterprises
        </li>
        <li>
            Nurse &amp; Clinic Manager <span class="at">at</span> <span>USAF</span>
        </li>
    </ul>
</dd>​​​​​

I want match the <li> node. I write the Regex:

<dt>.+?Past+?</dt>\s+?<dd>\s+?<ul class=""past"">\s+?(?:<li>\s*?([\W\w]+?)+?\s*?</li>)+\s+?</ul>

In fact they do not work.

Answer 1

No not parse HTML using a regex like it's just a big pile of text. Using a DOM parser is a proper way.

Answer 2

Don't use regular expressions to parse HTML...

Answer 3

please learn to use jQuery for this sort of thing

Answer 4

Don't use a regular expression to match an html document. It is better to parse it as a DOM tree using a simple state machine instead.

I'm assuming you're trying to get html list items. Since you're not specifying what language you use here's a little pseudo code to get you going:

Pseudo code:

while (iterating through the text)

    if (<li> matched)

        find position to </li>
        put the substring between <li> to </li> to a variable

There are of course numerous third-party libraries that do this sort of thing. Depending on your development environment, you might have a function that does this already (e.g. javascript).

Answer 5

Which language do you use?

If you use Python, you should try lxml: http://codespeak.net/lxml/. With lxml, you can search for the node with tag ul and class "past". You then retrieve its children, which are li, and get text of those nodes.

Answer 6

If you are trying to extract from or manipulate this HTML, xPath, xsl, or CSS selectors in jQuery might be easier and more maintainable than a regex. What exactly is your goal and in what framework are you operating?