Question

I need to catch the following tags + content in html source of the page:

<li class="someClass someClass2">
    ... some html code ...
</li>

I’m not very good at regular expressions, so I’ll also appreciate comments containing links to a good tutorial. I’ve been checking http://www.regular-expressions.info/ out, but I’m not very happy with explanations there.

What I found on the above site was smt like this:

<li\b[^>]*>(.*?)</li>

This matches all the <li> tags, which is not what I want. I tried messing around with it, and tested this one

<li class="someClass someClass[1-9]{1,1}[0-9]*">(.*?)</li>

Unfortunately, this one doesn’t do the job as well. The second class name is in format someClassX, where X is from {1, 2, … } (well, obviously, it’s not a set of natural numbers 🙂 )

All I get from this regexp is “no matches”. I’m using Ubuntu, Kodos tool.

What’s even more depressing is the fact that this regexp:

<li class="someClass someClass[1-9]{1,1}[0-9]*">

actually catches the opening <li> tags, but nothing more, just as if it gets “distracted” by new line character.

I’m still looking for a solution on google, and I’ll post it here if found, but I would also really appreciate some helpful input 🙂

Thx

Answer 1

This regex does what you’re looking for (in Kodos at least… your mileage may vary!)

<li class="someClass someClass[0-9]+">(.*\n)*?</li>