Question

I am using jEdit, and I have a bunch of badly coded HTML files of which I want to grab the main contents of and not the surrounding HTML.

I need everything in between <div class="main-text"> and the next </div>.

There must be a REGEX way of doing this, jEdit allows me to replace and find with regular expressions.

I am not profficient with regex and it would take me a long time to work it out – can anyone help quick please?

Answer 1

Taking your question literally, you can replace:

/.*<div class="main-text">(.*?)<\/div>.*/

with \1 (or $1 depending on what your editor uses).

However, The Pony He Comes to bite you, because what if your “main-text” element contains another <div>? If you’re sure this will not happen, then you’re fine. Otherwise, you’re in truble. It may be easier to replace /.*<div class="main-text">/ with the empty string, then manully look for the end and delete everything after.

For that matter, this task may be easiest to do manually, so you don’t have to double-check after your code has run.