So I have the following sample XML on a single line:
<foo>123</foo> <foo>456</foo> <bar>abc</bar> <foo>789</foo> <foo>0AB</foo> <bar>def</bar>
I'm looking for a regex which matches the first pair of <foo> tags, and which stops at the first <bar>
I'm trying solutions around:
/<foo>.\+<\/foo>.\+<bar
But this matches the entire thing. How do I get it to stop at the first <bar> ?
This happens because by default, regular expressions are greedy; that is, they match as much data as possible. However, in this case, what you want is a non-greedy regex so you match only the first part.
<foo>.\{-}<\/foo>.\{-}<bar
The pattern \{-} is equivalent to *, but is non-greedy, like Perl's *?. See :help non-greedy for more details.
As a side note, you cannot parse HTML or XML in the general case with regular expressions (since regexes are not powerful enough), but in this case I assume that you have a limited subset of data where this is good enough.
