How to match all characters between `<` and `>` except `/`?

Question

I want to extract all characters between < and > except / . So if it is </root> it should extract root and ignore / .

This is code for extracting for values between < and > :

/<(.*?)>/

How do I modify it to ignore / but still get the other characters?

Answer 1

You are close. Just add an optional slash after the opening pointy brace:

</?(.*)>

You should also probably not just accept any characters, but exclude the closing pointy brace:

</?([^>]*)>

The [^...] is a negated group that says "anything that's not in the group. The [ and ] mark the group, and the ^ as the first character negates.

That said, it's a really bad idea to parse XML with regular expressions. You should probably look into a XML parser.

If you are not parsing XML and want to exclude the slashes anywhere in the captured text (ie, not just right after the < ), you could do a Java text replacement like result.replace("/", ""); .