Question

I have a big ol’ HTML file filled with stuff.

Somewhere in that file, there’s a line like this

<span class="xcomponent">pls do not delete me</span>

I need to get rid of the stuff but leave what is in between.

I’m using Java, and I assume the right approach is regex – I just don’t really have enough experience with regex to pull this one off.

If it’s any help, here’s my ‘stab in the dark’ at it.

.*?(<span class="xcomponent">.*?</span>).*?

Answer 1

This is what you want:

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("<span class="xcomponent">(.*?)</span>");
Matcher m = p.matcher(html);
m.replaceAll("$1");