Question

I have the following within an XHTML document:

<script type="text/javascript" id="JSBALLOONS">
    function() {
        this.init = function() {
            this.wAPI = new widgetAPI('__BALLOONS__');
            this.getRssFeed();
        };
    }
</script>

I’m trying to select everything in between the two script tags. The id will always be JSBALLOONS if that helps. I know how to select that including the script tags, but I don’t know how to select the contents excluding the script tags. The result of the regular expression should be:

    function() {
        this.init = function() {
            this.wAPI = new widgetAPI('__BALLOONS__');
            this.getRssFeed();
        };
    }

Answer 1

(Updated post specifically for a Javascript solution.)

In Javascript, your code might look like this:

if (data.match(/<script[^>]+id="JSBALLOONS">([\S\s]*?)<\/script>/)) {
    inner_script = RegExp.$1;
}

That part between parentheses ([\S\s]*?) is saved by the regex engine and is accessible to you after a match is found. In Javascript, you can use RegExp.$1 to reference to the matched part inside the script tags. If you have more than one of such a group, surrounded by (), you can refer to them with RegExp.$2, and so on, up to RegExp.$9.

Javascript will not match newline characters by default, so that is why we have to use ([\S\s]*?) rather than (.*?), which may make more sense. Just to be complete, in other languages this is not necessary if you use the s modifier (/.../s).

(I have to add that regexes are typically very fragile when scraping content from HTML pages like this. You may be better off using the jQuery framework to extract the contents.)