Question

I need to match and remove all tags using a regular expression in Perl. I have the following:

<\\??(?!p).+?> 

But this still matches with the closing </p> tag. Any hint on how to match with the closing tag as well?

Note, this is being performed on xhtml.

Answer 1

I came up with this:

<(?!\/?p(?=>|\s.*>))\/?.*?>  x/ <           # Match open angle bracket (?!         # Negative lookahead (Not matching and not consuming)     \/?     # 0 or 1 /     p           # p     (?=     # Positive lookahead (Matching and not consuming)     >       # > - No attributes         |       # or     \s      # whitespace     .*      # anything up to      >       # close angle brackets - with attributes     )           # close positive lookahead )           # close negative lookahead             # if we have got this far then we don't match             # a p tag or closing p tag             # with or without attributes \/?         # optional close tag symbol (/) .*?         # and anything up to >           # first closing tag / 

This will now deal with p tags with or without attributes and the closing p tags, but will match pre and similar tags, with or without attributes.

It doesn’t strip out attributes, but my source data does not put them in. I may change this later to do this, but this will suffice for now.