Regular expression to get all the value between custom TAG

Question

I have custom tag for FLASH object, which i want to include in cms content. now when i read the content, i would like to grab those custom tag and the value in between.

Custom TAG:

<myflash filename="test.swf" width="500" height="400">
  <param name="wmode" value="somevalue"></param>
  <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff"></param>
  <var name="id" value="testid"></var>
</myflash>

now i'll require a regular expression which will read these entire block of code from the content. there will be more than one custom tag in one single content.

can anyone help please?

Kind regards,

Vipul

Answer 1

You can start with a very simple regex:

<myflash[^>]*>(.*?)</myflash>

Just make sure to use the "non-greedy" capture (.*?), so that the ".*" matches as little as possible.

Also, use RegexOptions.SingleLine, so that the dot matches every character, including \n:

Regex re = new Regex("<myflash[^>]*>(.*?)</myflash>", RegexOptions.SingleLine);

Answer 2

Regex is, IMO, the wrong tool for processing XML. Why not use XmlDocument or XDocument etc? If that is HTML (note no "X"), then the HTML Agility Pack may be useful.

With both XmlDocument and the HTML Agility Pack you can use xpath/xquery, so you can simply use .SelectNodes("//myflash"). XDocument has similar, but a different method: .Descendants("myFlash").

Answer 3

As Marc Gravell says, regexes are not suited to parsing HTML (or XML). See Can you provide some examples of why it is hard to parse XML and HTML with a regex? for why. You are much better off using an HTML parser. See Can you provide an example of parsing HTML with your favorite parser? for examples of how to use parsers in many languages (there are at least two examples using C#).