RegEx select whole string but omit substring match

Question

Consider a long html string: I need to have the whole content without certain tags sections.

Example:

Consider the following string:

;decreasing'>1</a>&nbsp;<span class='active'>2</span><a href='&#2;F;search&

I need to select all but the span section, thus removing the following

<span class='active'>2</span>

and ending up with only the following

;decreasing'>1</a>&nbsp;<a href='&#2;F;search&

I tried the following with negative look behind selections in regex101.com but no luck.

^(?!=(<span class='active'>(.*?)<\/span>)).*$

[Additional Info]

If I could combine the two following selections it would solve the problem:

1.Selects everything up to the span tag

.*?(?=<span)

Selects everything from the closing span tag onward:

(?<=span>).*

Thanks your help in advance.

What language/environment will you be running this pattern in? — mickmackusa, Jul 04 '17 at 11:58
Why do not you do a simple `replace` and then **print** `perl -lpe 's///g' file` — Shakiba Moshiri, Jul 04 '17 at 17:14

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 04 '17 at 12:10

0

If your coding language permits you to do a regex split or replace call, you can use this pattern:

~<(span).*?(/\1)>~ or expand your tag list like this: ~<(span|div).*?(/\1)>~

There are risks involved in processing html with regex patterns, but they may or may not come into play depending on the structure of your html.

answered Jul 04 '17 at 12:10

mickmackusa

If my method is not suitable for any reason, please leave me a comment and consider improving your question. – mickmackusa Jul 04 '17 at 12:11
Hi mickmackusa, thanks for the suggestion but if I am not wrong your regex selects the text I need to eliminate. What I need to do is select all the remaining text with exception of that. – polarized Jul 04 '17 at 12:49
@polarized That's why I am suggesting that you use this with a split or replace function. What language are you using? – mickmackusa Jul 04 '17 at 12:50
Hi, I need to use it with the screen-scraper program to create a sub-extractor pattern. As the position of the tag section constantly changes across the multiple pages being scraped, I need to ignore it and consider only the rest of the string. Unfortunately I cannot use a replace function, only RegEx. I managed to do it once but really cannot remember the solution. :-( – polarized Jul 04 '17 at 12:58
@polarized What is the name of the screen-scraper program? – mickmackusa Jul 04 '17 at 13:00

1 Answers1