Regex to match all HTML tags and tag content except <p> and </p>

Question

I am looking for a regex to match all HTML tags, except <p> and </p> that includes the tag content. I am developing in ColdFusion.

There was an earlier post about matching tags except <p> and </p>, but I need to grab everything between the tags as well. For instance, the following should match in their entirety:

<a href="http://www.google.com"&gt;Google&lt;/a&gt;

and

<em>Some text here</em>

but not

<p>Some text and tags here</p>

Any ideas on how to accomplish this?

Answer 1

Sometimes it's easier to combine a regex with a little extra checking.

So \<.*?\>.*?\<\/.*?\> should match anything between <..>...</..> like tags. You can then programmatically check that the <..> and </...> are not <p> and </p> respectively. It'd probably be easiest to check this if you group them ala:

(\<.*?\>).*?(\<\/.*?\>)

then check to make sure $1 and $2 (or however you do backreferences in your environment) aren't the paragraph open and close tags.

.*? specifies minimal matching; I'm assuming your regex environment supports that.

Answer 2

Parsing HTML using regular expressions is very very hard and painful.

You're better off using some sort of DOM-based parser and finding the elements you need.

Answer 3

You haven't said what you're trying to do, but there's a good change you're better off with using the XmlParse function to create an XML DOM, and working on that instead.

Answer 4

Does this work? I only did a few checks on it, but it seems to:

Regex expr = new Regex(@"<([A-OQ-Z][A-Z0-9]*)\b[^>]*>(.*?)</\1>", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

I just copied & pasted the C# code. To get everything between the tags, you need to use \1, and then you need to turn off case sensitivity, so IgnoreCase, or -i, or whatever tool you're using provides that option. If your tool doesn't do this, then you will have to do A-Oa-oq-zQ-z etc. Just the regex:

<([A-OQ-Z][A-Z0-9]*)\b[^>]*>(.*?)</\1>

Note this will note match standalone tags, but should get you started.