正则表达式匹配包含在 HTML 跨度标签中的多个单词

Question

I'm working on a regex to match phrases in a HTML string. For example, I want to find every instance of "artificial intelligence" and return the <span> tag that immediately precedes it.

The trouble I have is that the my regex only returns one large match.

Here is a link to an online regex builder I've been using: https://regex101.com/r/rK9yO9/1

I am looking to return the following two matches:

<span m='3'>
<span m='13'>

Example string:

<p><span m='2'>of</span> <span m='3'>artificial</span> 
<span m='4'>intelligence.</span><span m='4'>So</span> 
<span m='5'>that</span> <span m='6'>seems</span> 
<span m='9'>good.</span> <span m='10'>The</span> 
<span m='11'>impact</span> <span m='12'>of</span> 
<span m='13'>artificial</span> <span m='14'>intelligence,</span> 
<span m='15'>on</span> </p>

Nb there are no newlines in the text, I added those for readability.

The regex I have so far is:

(<span.*>)artificial.?<\\/span>.?<span.*>intelligence.?<\\/span>

Which returns the following match:

<span m='2'>of</span> <span m='3'>artificial</span> 
<span m='4'>intelligence.</span><span m='4'>So</span> 
<span m='5'>that</span> <span m='6'>seems</span> 
<span m='9'>good.</span> <span m='10'>The</span> 
<span m='11'>impact</span> <span m='12'>of</span> 
<span m='13'>artificial</span> <span m='14'>intelligence,</span>

Answer 1

You are using greedy regex. To make matching stop at first occurrence use ?

(<span.*?>)artificial.?<\/span>.?<span.*?>intelligence.?<\/span>

will match

'<span m='2'>of</span> <span m='3'>artificial</span> <span m='4'>intelligence.</span>'

you can easily get the first group matched

Answer 2

Try this regex:

 /(<span[^<]+?>(?:artificial|intelligenc\.)<\/span>)/gm

See DEMO

It should match only selected tags