Question

I have a string variable which contains

"A regular expression is an object that describes a pattern of characters.

<strong>Regular expressions are used to perform pattern-matching.</strong> and "search-and-replace" functions on text.

I have to extract

 "<strong>Regular expressions are used to perform pattern-matching</strong>"

For this i am using

^<strong>([A-Za-z0-9-\s]+)</strong>$

regular expression.
But it is not working.
Any idea why?

Answer 1

try this

<strong>([^<]*)</strong>

or this

<strong>([A-Za-z0-9-\s.]+)</strong>

Your expression does not work because of the following:

1. ^ and $ mean beginning and end of string. So pattern will match only when nothing is before <strong> and nothing is after </strong>. In your case you have text after </strong>
2. You missed period in your character class expression. It would be ([A-Za-z0-9-\s.]+)