正则表达式以匹配表达式，后跟小写字符

Question

I want to match a closing tag followed by an 0+ spaces/newlines followed by an opening tag when followed by a lowercase letter. Examples:

• text</p> <p>blah matches </p> <p>
• text</i><i>and more text <b>but not this</b> matches </i><i>
• text</i> <i>And more text does not match

I tried this: </.*?>\\s*\\n*\\s*<.*>(?=[az]) , but it doesn't work for the second example, as it will match </i><i> and more text </b> even though the question mark should make it "lazy".

Answer 1

Making a quantifier lazy only makes the regex try the shortest possible match first , but if that doesn't work, it will gladly expand the match until the entire regex succeeds.

You need to be more specific in what you allow to match - for example by not allowing angle brackets inside a tag:

</[^<>]*>\s*<[^/][^<>]*>(?=[a-z])

(Also, \\s already contains \\n , so \\s*\\n*\\s* can be shortened to \\s* )

Answer 2

Try:

</[^>]+>\s*<[^/>]+>(?=[a-z])

Change the '+' to '*' if you want to be able to match empty tags