Hi
I'm trying to write a regular expression for my html parser.
I want to match a html tag with given attribute (eg. <div> with class="tab news selected" ) that contains one or more <a href> tags. The regexp should match the entire tag (from <div> to </div>). I always seem to get "memory exhausted" errors - my program probably takes every tag it can find as a matching one.
I'm using boost regex libraries.
You should probably look at this question re. regexps and HTML. The gist is that using regular expressions to parse HTML is not by any means an ideal solution.
in addition, you could try to post what you have now, instead of letting us start from scratch ;)
Do as flex does: match <div> with a case insensitive match, and put your parser in a "div matched" state, keep processing input until </div> and reset state.
This takes two regexps and a state variable.
SGML tags valid characters are [A-Za-z_:]
So: /<[A-Za-z_:]+>/ matches a tag.
Maybe regexps aren't the best solution, but I'm already using like five different libraries and boost does fine when it comes to locating <a href> tags and keywords.
I'm using these regexps:
/<a[^\n]*/searched attribute/[^\n]*>[^\n]*</a>/ for locating <a href> tags and:
/<a[^\n]*href[[^\n]*>/searched keyword/</a>/ for locating links
(BTW can it be done better? - I suck at regex ;))
What I need now is locating tags containing <a href>'s and I think regexps will do all right - maybe I'll need to write my own parsing function as piotr said.
You may also find these questions helpful:
Can you provide some examples of why it is hard to parse XML and HTML with a regex?
Can you provide an example of parsing HTML with your favorite parser?