正则表达式以相同的字符串开头和结尾，而不仅仅是相同的字符

Question

I want to create a regular expression to receive:

<p class="MyClass">
   <p> something 1 </p>
   <p> something 2 </p>
   <span>         <span>  // or more html tag here
   something
</p>
something's here, not in any tag!

from:

<p class="MyClass">
   <p> something 1 </p>
   <p> something 2 </p>
   <span>         <span>  // or more html tag here
   something
</p>
something's here, not in any tag!

<p class="MyClass">
   <p> another thing 1</p>
   <p> another thing 2</p>
   <p> another thing 3</p>
   another thing
</p>
...

I think I will use a regex to match everything between <p class="MyClass"> and the next one. So the regex is /(<p class="MyClass">[\\s\\S]*)<p class="MyClass">/ , work correctly in this case. But it doesn't work when I want to get a notification of this page http://daotao.dut.udn.vn/sv/G_Thongbao_LopHP.aspx . The DOM is so strange ?!

Sorry for my bad English.

Answer 1

regex should be

(<p class="MyClass">[\s\S]*?)(?=<p class="MyClass">|$)

• [\\s\\S]*? : *? is a lazy quantifier so that it matches the shortest the default is greedy (matches the largest).
• (?=<p class="MyClass">|$) : lookhead so that it does not belongs to the match, and |$ to get also the last match