Question

I am using the regexp,

/(\<\s*?string(-array)?\s*?.*?\s*?\>\s*?)(.*)(\s*?\<\/string(-array)?\>)/ 

… to match all content between or tags of the form:

<string-array name="saveArray">
  <item>Téléphone</item>
  <item>Carte mémoires</item>
</string-array>

Problem is, I’m only able to match the contents of ‘string’ tags or arrays containing one item. When I replace the dot from the captured group in the middle with [^s], I get the content I want, but this solution would fail to match any content containing ‘s’. I tried a negative look-behind for ‘str’ immediately preceding the content (‘item-matching’) group, and it is giving me the same results.

Any help would be great!

Answer 1

You really should not parse xml using regexps.

That said, I think the thing that’s messing you up might be that “.” (in many regexp engines, with default flags) matches any character except a newline.. So your .* will not match more than one line. Try replacing “.*” with “[\w\W]*“, or adding a regexp flag that says that “.” should match all characters.