Home/ Questions/Q 6013099
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-23T02:29:59+00:00

I have a string input in the following two forms. 1. <!–XYZdfdjf., 15456, hdfv.4002–>

  • 0

I have a string input in the following two forms.

1.

<!--XYZdfdjf., 15456, hdfv.4002-->
<!DOCTYPE

2.

<!--XYZdfdjf., 15456, hdfv.4002
<!DOCTYPE

I want to return a match if the form 2 is encountered and no match for the form 1.
Thus basically I want a regex that accepts arbitrarily all characters between <!-- and <!DOCTYPE, except when there is an occurance of --> in between.

I am using Pattern , Matcher and java regex.
Help is sought in terms of a regex specifically usable with Pattern.compile()

Thanks in advance.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team
    Pattern p = Pattern.compile("(?s)<!--(?:(?!-->).)*<!DOCTYPE");

    (?:(?!-->).)* matches one character at a time, after checking that it’s not the first character of -->.

    (?s) sets DOTALL mode (a.k.a. single-line mode), allowing the . to match newline characters.

    If there’s a possibility of two or more matches and you want to find them individually, you can replace the * with a non-greedy *?, like so:

    "(?s)<!--(?:(?!-->).)*?<!DOCTYPE"

    For example, applying that regex to the text of your question will find two matches, while the original regex will find one, longer match.

    • 0