4

How can I get the text between two constant text?

Example:

<rate curr="KRW" unit="100">19,94</rate>

19,94

is between

"<rate curr="KRW" unit="100">"

and

"</rate>"

Other example:

ABCDEF

getting substring between AB and EF= CD

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2
  • 2
    he com̡e̶s Commented Jan 30, 2012 at 12:45
  • 1
    What language/tool are you using? Commented Jan 30, 2012 at 12:48

6 Answers 6

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5

Try with:

/<rate[^>]*>(.*?)<\/rate>/

However it is better NOT TO USE REGEX WITH HTML.

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1 Comment

I'm expecting something like /<rate curr="KRW" unit="100">(.*?)</rate> not the general form, despite of it may works
2

The way I do it is using the match all

matched = Regex.Matches(result, @"(?<=<rate curr=\"KRW\" unit=\"100\">)(.*?)(?=</rate>)");

Then get one by one using match[i].Groups[1].value

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Comments

1

If you're analyzing HTML, you're probably better off going with javascript and .innerHTML(). Regex is a bit overkill.

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1 Comment

+1 and I would express the same sentiment with PHP and strip_tags.
0

If you want a generic solution, i.e to find a string between two strings You may use Pattern.quote() [or wrap string with \Q and \E around] to quote start and end strings and use (.*?) for a non greedy match.

See an example of its use in below snippet

@Test public void quoteText(){ String str1 = "<rate curr=\"KRW\" unit=\"100\">"; String str2 = "</rate>"; String input = "<rate curr=\"KRW\" unit=\"100\">19,94</rate>" +"<rate curr=\"KRW\" unit=\"100\"></rate>" +"<rate curr=\"KRW\" unit=\"100\">19,96</rate>"; String regex = Pattern.quote(str1)+"(.*?)"+Pattern.quote(str2); System.out.println("regex:"+regex); Pattern p = Pattern.compile(regex); Matcher m = p.matcher(input); while(m.find()){ String group = m.group(1); System.out.println("--"+group); }

Output

regex:\Q<rate curr="KRW" unit="100">\E(.*?)\Q</rate>\E --19,94 -- --19,96

Note:Though its not recommended to use regex to parse entire HTML, I think there is no harm in conscious use of regex while treating HTML as plain text

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Comments

0

The simple regex matching string you're looking for is: 

(?<=<rate curr=\"KRW\" unit=\"100\">)(.*?)(?=</rate>)

In Ruby, for example, this would translate to: 

string = '<rate curr="KRW" unit="100">19,94</rate>' string.match("(?<=<rate curr=\"KRW\" unit=\"100\">)(.*?)(?=</rate>)").to_s # => "19,94"

Thanks to Will Yu.

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Comments

-1

I suggest that you use an HTML parser. The grammar that defines HTML is a context-free grammar, which is fundamentally too complex to be parsed by regular expressions. Even if you manage to write a regular expression that will achieve what you want, but will probably fail on some corner cases.

For instance, what if you are expected to parse the following HTML?

<rate curr="KRW" unit="100"><rate curr="KRW" unit="100">19,94</rate></rate>

A regular expression may not handle this corner case properly.

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1 Comment

It will never look like that in this case, and if it would, I dont care. I just want to know how to use regexp to find the text between two texts.