How would I use Regex to extract the body from a html doc, taking into account that the html and body tags might be in uppercase, lowercase or might not exist?
+7
A:
Don't use a regular expression for this - use something like the Html Agility Pack.
This is an agile HTML parser that builds a read/write DOM and supports plain XPATH or XSLT (you actually don't HAVE to understand XPATH nor XSLT to use it, don't worry...). It is a .NET code library that allows you to parse "out of the web" HTML files. The parser is very tolerant with "real world" malformed HTML. The object model is very similar to what proposes System.Xml, but for HTML documents (or streams).
Then you can extract the body with an XPATH.
Andrew Hare
2009-06-11 17:33:56
I agree. I've used this and must say it's fast, neat and clean.
Saif Khan
2009-06-11 17:46:45
A:
This should get you pretty close:
(?is)<body(?:\s[^>]*)>(.*?)(?:</\s*body\s*>|</\s*html\s*>|$)
Jeremy Stein
2009-06-11 19:55:26
A:
How about something like this?
It captures everything between <body></body> tags (case insensitive due to RegexOptions.IgnoreCase) into a group named theBody.
RegexOptions.Singleline allows us to handle multiline HTML as a single string.
If the HTML does not contain <body></body> tags, the Success property of the match will be false.
string html;
// Populate the html string here
RegexOptions options = RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Singleline;
Regex regx = new Regex( "<body>(?<theBody>.*)</body>", options );
Match match = regx.Match( html );
if ( match.Success ) {
string theBody = match.Groups["theBody"].Value;
}
Darryl
2009-06-17 15:04:04