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Asked: 2026-05-25T18:43:23+00:00

I have a string with some HTML code in, for example: This is <strong

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I have a string with some HTML code in, for example:

This is <strong id="c1-id-8">some</strong> <em id="c1-id-9">text</em>

I need to strip out the id attribute from every HTML tag, but I have zero experience with regular expressions, so I searched here and there from the internet and I wrote this pattern: [\s]+id=\".*\"

Unfortunately it’s not working as I would expect. Infact, I was hoping that the regular expression would catch the id=" followed by any character repeated for any number of times and terminated with the nearest double quote; Practically in this example I was expecting to catch id="c1-id-8" and id="c1-id-9".
But instead the pattern returned me the substring id="c1-id-8">some</strong> <em id="c1-id-9", it finds the first occurrence of id=" and the last occurrence of a double quote character.

Could you tell me what is wrong in my pattern and how to fix it, please?
Thank you very much

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The quantifier .* in your regex is greedy (meaning it matches as much as it can). In order to match the minimum required you could use something like /\s+id=\"[^\"]*\"/. The brackets [] indicate a character class. So it will match everything inside of the brackets. The carat [^] at the beginning of your character class is a negation, meaning it will match everything except what is specified in the brackets.

    An alternative would be to tell the .* quantifier to be lazy by changing it to .*? which will match as little as it can.

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