Question

Hey all, what would the regEX code be for the following:

<br/><span class=""synopsis-view-synopsis"">America's justice system comes under indictment in director <a href='/people/1035' class='actor' style='font-weight:bold'>Norman Jewison</a>'s trenchant film starring <a href='/people/1028' class='actor' style='font-weight:bold'>Al Pacino</a> as upstanding attorney Arthur Kirkland. A hard-line -- and tainted -- judge (<a href='/people/1034' class='actor' style='font-weight:bold'>John Forsythe</a>) stands accused of rape, and Kirkland (<a href='/people/1028' class='actor' style='font-weight:bold'>Al Pacino</a>) has to defend him. Kirkland has a history with the judge, who jailed one of the lawyer's clients on a technicality. When the judge confesses his guilt, Kirkland faces an ethical and legal quandary. </span>

Ive tried this:

regex = New System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex("(?<=""synopsis-view-synopsis""\>)([^<\/span><]+)")

But that only seems to get the first part of the description; Americ

Any help would be great! :o)

David

Answer 1

I don’t see any need for lookaheads or lookbehinds here; just match the whole <span> element and use a capturing group extract its content. Assuming there will never be any <span> elements inside the one you’re matching, this should be all you need:

Regex rgx = new Regex(
    @"<span\s+class=""synopsis-view-synopsis"">(.*?)</span>",
    RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Singleline);

foreach (Match m in rgx.Matches(s0))
{
  Console.WriteLine(m.Groups[1].Value);
}

Also, [^<\/span><]+ doesn’t do what you probably think it does. What you’ve got there is a character class that matches any one character except <, /, s, p, a, n, or >. You may have been trying for this:

(?:(?!</span>).)+

…which matches one character at a time, after the lookahead confirms that the character isn’t the beginning of the sequence </span>. It’s a valid technique, but (as with the lookarounds) I don’t think you need anything so fancy here.