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This has been driving me crazy, I can't find a solution that works! I'm trying to do a regex between a couple of tags, bad idea I've heard but necessary this time :P What I have at the start is a <body class="foo"> where foo can vary between files - <body.*?> search works fine to locate the only copy in each file.

At the end I have a <div id="bar">, bar doesn't change between files.

eg. 

<body class="foo"> sometext some more text <maybe even some tags> <div id="bar">

What I need to do is select everything between the two tags but not including them - everything between the closing > on body and the opening < on div - sometext to maybe even some tags.

I've tried a bunch of things, mostly variations on (?<=<body.*>)(.*?)(?=<div id="bar">) but I'm actually getting invalid expressions at worst on notepad++, http://regexpal.com/ and no matches at best.

Any help appreciated!

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You are attempting to implement variable-length lookbehind in which most regular expression languages and notepad++ does not support. I assume you are using notepad++ so you can use the \K escape sequence.

<body[^>]*>\K.*?(?=<div id="bar">)

The \K escape sequence resets the starting point of the reported match and any previously consumed characters are no longer included. Make sure you have the . matches newline checkbox checked as well.

Alternatively, you can use a capturing group and avoid using lookaround assertions.

<body[^>]*>(.*?)<div id="bar">

Note: Using a capturing group, you can refer to group index "1" to get your match result.

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Thanks for your input :) Unfortunately this is also grabbing the <body> and <div> tags. I might be a little out of my depth getting it to ignore those, I don't suppose you'd know a solution?
At the moment i'm using notepad++ on win and regexpal.com to test. Both grabbed the tags :/
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Use the following pattern:

/<body[^>]*>(.*?)<div id="bar">/
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Thanks for taking the time to reply! Unfortunately this is grabbing nothing in notepad++, on regexpal.com it grabs nothing unless I remove the '/' marks, then it grabs the outer tags I was trying to avoid grabbing.
@user891141 I assumed that you were working in JavaScript. /pattern/ is the default method of depicting a regex pattern in JS. As for grabbing the body and div tags, I think that you are confusing grabbing with grouping.
Quite possibly was confusing my terms :P Thanks again for your input :)

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