来自HTML的简单正则表达式

Question

I have the following code grabbed from a webpage source code:

<span>41,396</span>

And the following regex:

("<span>.*</span>")

Which returns

<span>New Users</span>

However, I don't want to have the tags in the results. I've tried a few things, but Regular Expressions are new to me.

More so than this I need to get the Regex for the following code:

<span>41,396</span>
</span>
<span class="levelColumn">
<span>2,150</span>
</span>
<span class="xpColumn">
<span>161,305,807</span>

I was thinking this may involve line breaks and more, which is why I threw this is separately.

Answer 1

You could try something like

<span( class=\".+\")?>(.*)</span>

And then get capture group 2 for the tag's body. But be aware that regular expressions are NOT good for parsing HTML/XML. What would happen if you had nested <span> tags?

If the input gets even the slightest bit more complicated than what you've shown, look for an HTML parser and try using that instead.

Answer 2

You can use capturing group differently to get the value instead of tag + value

"<span>(.*)</span>"

Think to use a HTML parsing library in your language of choice if regex become more complicated.

Answer 3

As far as I know regex will lookup line by line, but you could have an expression that would work that out.

Try: <span>(.*)</span>

You should be able to retrieve the information you want with \\1

In the case of <span class="xpColumn"> it would just not match and \\1 would be empty..

Cheers :)