Regex to read out HTML tags

Question

I'm looking for a regex that matches all used HTML tags in a text consisting of several lines. It should read out "b", "p" and "script" in the following lines:

<b>
<p class="normalText">
<script type="text/javascript">

Is there such thing? The start I have is that it should start with a "<" and read until it hits a space or a ">", but at the same time, it should not include the starting "<" since I just want to match the letter/word itself. Thoughts?

Answer 1

I don't know what system you are using, but it can be done to a certain extent. Look at this online flex-based application. Check out the Published > XML regex examples. You will get an idea.

Answer 2

There are many similar questions on SO:

1. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37486/filter-out-html-tags-and-resolve-entities-in-python
2. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29869/regex-to-match-all-html-tags-except-p-and-p
3. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/44078/strip-all-html-tags-except-links

etc. The general agreement is that it's best not to use regular expressions to parse HTML instead of doing it properly by applying a DOM parser and traversing the DOM tree.

Answer 3

It's virtually impossible to regex HTML once you start considering all the special cases and malformed HTML that browsers sometimes happilly parse anyway. That said however I thought it might be fun to get the names without using capture groups and thus I present too you with the following sollution:

(?<=<)\w+(?=[^<]*?>)

For the record I hold little faith in it being at all useful in any but the most trivial of cases.