Reg.exp help

Masali · Apr 27, 2006

I am trying to make a match for a table that contains several tags, but always contains the sentence "Hello World"

I have been trying to match this with:

Code:

<table .*>[\w\s\t\r\n\d\D]*?Hello World[\w\s\t\r\n\d\D]*?(?!table)<\/table>

on the below html:

Code:

<html>

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<title>Example</title>
</head>

<body topmargin="0" leftmargin="0" bgcolor="#CC3399">

<div align="center">
	<table id="table3" style="border: 2px solid #000000" cellSpacing="1" width="800" bgColor="#ffffff" border="1">
		<tr>
			<td><center><img border="0" src="logo.gif" width="800" height="190">
			<table id="table4" style="font-size: 16px; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" border="0">
				<tr>
					<td><hr width="190" color="#000000" SIZE="1"></td>
					<td></td>
					<td><hr width="190" color="#000000" SIZE="1"></td>
				</tr>
			</table>
			<br>
			<font size="+2"><a href="a.html">A</a> ~
			<a href="b.html">B</a></font><br>
			<br>
&nbsp;<table style="border: 2px dotted #7b68ee" width="760" bgColor="#ffffff" border="0" id="table5">
				<tr>
					<td align="middle"><br>
					<font size="+1">Hello World<br>
					<a href="test">
					<img src="logo.gif" border="0"></a></font> 
					<p><br>
					<br>
&nbsp;</td>
				</tr>
			</table>
			</center></td>
		</tr>
	</table>
</div>

</body>

</html>

but it matches too much:

Code:

<table id="table3" style="border: 2px solid #000000" cellSpacing="1" width="800" bgColor="#ffffff" border="1">
        <tr>
            <td><center><img border="0" src="logo.gif" width="800" height="190">
            <table id="table4" style="font-size: 16px; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" border="0">
                <tr>
                    <td><hr width="190" color="#000000" SIZE="1"></td>
                    <td></td>
                    <td><hr width="190" color="#000000" SIZE="1"></td>
                </tr>
            </table>
            <br>
            <font size="+2"><a href="a.html">A</a> ~
            <a href="b.html">B</a></font><br>
            <br>
&nbsp;<table style="border: 2px dotted #7b68ee" width="760" bgColor="#ffffff" border="0" id="table5">
                <tr>
                    <td align="middle"><br>
                    <font size="+1">Hello World<br>
                    <a href="test">
                    <img src="logo.gif" border="0"></a></font> 
                    <p><br>
                    <br>
&nbsp;</td>
                </tr>
            </table>

The table i want to match is:

Code:

<table style="border: 2px dotted #7b68ee" width="760" bgColor="#ffffff" border="0" id="table5">
                <tr>
                    <td align="middle"><br>
                    <font size="+1">Hello World<br>
                    <a href="test">
                    <img src="logo.gif" border="0"></a></font> 
                    <p><br>
                    <br>
&nbsp;</td>
                </tr>
            </table>

What am I doing wrong with the regexp??

Would really appreciate som help from a regexp guru!

/Masali

OsakaWebbie · Apr 28, 2006

Well, I'm not a regexp guru, but I recently had to wrestle with the issue of greedy regexp expressions that took too much, so it's fresh in my mind. How about something like this?

Code:

<table[^(<table)]*Hello World[^(<table)]*</table>

The key is to allow anything that would be inside a table except another table. I'm not sure whether the "anything but" clause should check for the opening tag or the closing tag - in my code (which is looking for stuff in [brackets]), either the opening or the closing works. I'm also not completely sure that parentheses is what you need to tell regexp that the "^" should apply to several characters instead of just one, since in my code it's a single character ("[^\[]" or "[^\]]"). But try it out and see.

However, if you want to also check that your table is well-formed (having proper tr's and td's and such), it would be much more complex. I'm just assuming all you want is "Hello World" in one and only one table.

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Reg.exp help

Masali

Programmer

OsakaWebbie

Programmer

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