正则表达式匹配除特定字符串外的任何字符

Question

I am using the regexp,

/(\<\s*?string(-array)?\s*?.*?\s*?\>\s*?)(.*)(\s*?\<\/string(-array)?\>)/ 

... to match all content between or tags of the form:

<string-array name="saveArray">
  <item>Téléphone</item>
  <item>Carte mémoires</item>
</string-array>

Problem is, I'm only able to match the contents of 'string' tags or arrays containing one item. When I replace the dot from the captured group in the middle with [^s], I get the content I want, but this solution would fail to match any content containing 's'. I tried a negative look-behind for 'str' immediately preceding the content ('item-matching') group, and it is giving me the same results.

Any help would be great!

Answer 1

You need to use SimpleXML to parse XML. The XML may change or not match your regex in edge cases - so it's best to just use an XML parser.

<?php
$xml '<string-array name="saveArray">'
. '<item>Téléphone</item>'
. '<item>Carte mémoires</item>'
. '</string-array>';

$items = new SimpleXMLElement($xml);

Answer 2

As others have said do not use regex to parse xml/html.

In any case this should work :

if ($subject =~ m!<(string-array)[^>]*>(.*?)</\1>!si) {
    print $2, "\n";
}

Answer 3

You really should not parse xml using regexps.

That said, I think the thing that's messing you up might be that " . " (in many regexp engines, with default flags) matches any character except a newline.. So your .* will not match more than one line. Try replacing " .* " with " [\\w\\W]* ", or adding a regexp flag that says that " . " should match all characters.