Question

I don’t quite know how to describe my problem in a short title so I am sorry if the title for this question is a bit mis-leading.
But I really don’t know what the thing I am looking for is called or if it is even possible.

I am trying to use a regular expression to find everything between a set of matching tags in HTML.
This was easy for me when I was testing with static tags because I could just search for everything in between two pieces of text such as \{myTag\}(someExpression)\{\/myTag\}

My problem comes with the fact that ‘myTag’ could be anything.
I just don’t know how (or if it is even possible) to match the starting tag with the ending tag when that text is variable.

I thought I had seen some kind of referencing system in regular expressions before where you can use the dollar sign and a number, but I don’t know if you can use this within the search itself.

I originally thought that perhaps I could write something like: \{(.*?)\}(someExpression)\{\/${1}\} but I have no idea if this would actually work or if it is possible (let alone if it is correct).

I hope this question makes sense as I’m not really sure how to ask it.
Mainly because like I said I don’t know if this has a name, if it is possible and I am also a total beginner at regular experessions.

And if it makes any difference the language I am doing this is in PHP with the preg_replace_callback function.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Try this:

\{([^}]*)\}(someExpression)\{\/\1\}

but be aware that you need to make sure someExpression doesn’t match ending tags as well (like for example .* would). And of course, if tags are nested, then all bets are off, and you’ll need a different regex (or a parser).