Capturing text with Python regular expressions

Question

I've been having a bit of trouble with capturing strings between html tags using Python regular expressions. I've been trying to capture the string "example link 2" from the string below:

<link>example link 1</link>
<item>
     <link>example link 2</link>
</item>

I've got this so far:

(?<=<link>)(.*)(?=</link>)

However the regular expression above returns "example link 1" and "example link 2". Could anyone please help with selecting only "example link 2"?

EDIT: Unfortunately I'm required to use regular expressions for this question so i can't use a parser etc. Thanks for the recommendation though.

Answer 1

You need to add 'g' modifier at the end. For example the regex should look like:

/(?<=\<link>)(.*)(?=<\/link>)/g

The 'g' modifier tells the engine not to stop after the first match has been found, but rather to continue until no more matches can be found.
Demo here