RegEx match first occurrence before keyword

Question

I have the following string:

<ul><li><span>some words here.</span></li><li><span>other words here.</span></li><li><span>Code: 55555.</span></li></ul>

My goal is to remove this part from the string, the set of li tags which contain "code" keyword:

<li><span>Code: 55555.</span></li>

I am trying to write a RegEx that will help me match and replace my substring. Text in between <li></li> might vary but it will always have the keyword "Code". This is what I have so far:

<li>(.*)code:(.*?)<\/li>

The problem is, it matches from the first <li> tag and I want it to match starting from the <li> tag which is right before our keyword "code".

Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

<li>(?:.(?!</li>))+Code:(?:.*?)</li>

• Match <li> literally
• Followed by any number of characters where the literal </li> doesn't match (this ensures the match will start only at the relevant <li>)
• Followed by the literal Code:
• Followed by any number of characters (non-greedy) until the literal </li> is matched

Demo

Answer 2

You can try regex groups for that, so your regex would be something like that:

r'(<\li>(.*)code:(.*?)</li>){1,}'

This regex will match more than 1 occurrence of string which has format <\li>(.*)code:(.*?)</li>.

I guess this might help you a bit.

Answer 3

(.*)(<li>.*span.*<\/li>)(.*)

The RegEx provided by Tim Biegeleisen works just fine. If you want to make sure the word "Code" exists, just replace 'span' with 'Code', like:

(.*)(<li>.*Code.*<\/li>)(.*)

Answer 4

[a-z|A-Z][Cc]ode: [0-9|.]+[a-z|A-Z]

Here the keyword "Code" is made mandatory in the regex