Question

I need to parse and return the tagname and the attributes in our PHP code files:

<ct:tagname attr='attr1' attr='attr2'> 

For this purpose the following regular expression has been constructed:

(\<ct:([^\s\>]*)([^\>]*)\>) 

This expression works as expected but it breaks when the following code is parsed

<ct:form/input type='attr1' value='$item->field'> 

The original regular expression breaks because of the > character in the $item->field. I would need to construct a regular expression that ignores the -> or => but not the single >.

I am open to any suggestions… Thanks for your help in advance.

Answer 1

You could try using negative lookbehind like that:

(\<ct:([^\s\>]*)(.*?)(?<!-|=)\>) 

Matches :

<ct:tagname attr='attr1' attr='attr2'> <ct:form/input type='attr1' value='$item->field'> 

Not sure that it the best suited solution for your case, but that respects the constraints.