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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-07T03:48:13+00:00

Going crazy trying to figure this out for the past 2 hours. I have

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Going crazy trying to figure this out for the past 2 hours. I have this html returned as a string from an AJAX request:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
    <title>Preview</title>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <meta name="author" content="Connected Ventures LLC. Copyright 1999-2010." />
    <script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery.ui.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="js/article.js"></script>
    <link href="/css/global.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
    <link href="/css/article.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
    <style type="text/css">
    html, body { background: #fff; color: #000; }
    </style>
</head>
<body class="the_article">
        <p>s</p></body>
</html>

I need to get the content in between the body tags. I already tried this which was suggested in another SO question on parsing html via jQuery:

$(ajax_response).find('body.the_article').html();

Didn’t work. Even after adding:

dataType: 'html'

as an ajax request parameter. Then I tried to parse it using regex:

ajax_response.match(/<body class="the_article">.*?<\/body>/);

it just alerts null. Any idea how I can get the body content?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Your REGEX is failing because the string is multi-line, and the . wildcard matches all characters except whitespace characters, so the newline after, say, the opening body tag and the body’s content, breaks the pattern.

    Use [\s\S] instead of . (literally, allow non-space and space characters)

    /<body class="the_article">[\s\S]*?<\/body>/

    [EDIT] – in response to the comment, to capture the body content exclusive of its tags, capture the contents as a sub-group:

    var body = response.match(/<body class="the_article">([\s\S]*?)(?=<\/body>)/);
console.log(body[1]); //body content, not including tag

    Note also we specify the closing body tag as a look-ahead, since we don’t need to match that at all, merely anchor to it. (JS doesn’t support look-behinds, short of simulations like the one I wrote, so we have no choice but to capture the opening body tag).

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