Question

Here is sample data

<table class="sparql" border="1"> 
<tr> <th>abstract</th></tr> 
<tr> 
  <td>
    Cologne is Germany&#39;s fourth-largest city, and is the 
    largest city both in 
    the German Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the 
    Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan
    areas with more than ten million inhabitants."@en
 </td> 
 </tr> 
</table>

and I am trying to get the contents between <td> tag using Regular Expression. I tried something like

<td>.*</td>

But how to discard tags itselef?

Answer 1

As @MisterJack points out, you need to use subexpressions to be able to refer to the match. If you’re using REReplace(), then you can use \1 (or \2, etc.) as a backreference to the match. If you’re using REFind(), then you’ll want to use it with returnsubexpressions=true, and it will return a struct with len and pos arrays for the matching values. I would do this:

<!--- I use "?" below because we want to be lazy rather than greedy --->
<cfset the_match = REFind(the_content, "<td>(.*?)</td>", 1, true) />

<cfdump var="#the_match#" />

You should see a structure with len and pos arrays. It may have only one element in each array. In order to get the match content you could then do:

<cfset match_content = mid(the_content, pos[i], len[i]) />

Hope this helps.