Question

I need to remove the tag “image” with regex.

I’m working with C# .Net

example <rrr><image from="91524" to="92505" /></rrr> should become:

<rrr></rrr>

Anyone???

Answer 1

You shouldn’t really be using regex for this task, especially when .NET provides such powerful tools to handle XML:

XElement xml = XElement.Parse("<rrr><image from=\"91524\" to=\"92505\" /></rrr>");
xml.Descendants("image").Remove();

However if you insist on doing this with regex, let’s see what happens:

string xml = "<rrr><image from=\"91524\" to=\"92505\" /></rrr>";
string output = Regex.Replace(xml, "<image.*?>", "");

This method has some problems though that the first method solves for you. Example problems:

• Doesn’t handle case sensitivity.
• > characters in attributes can confuse the regex.
• Newlines won’t be matched correctly.
• Incorrectly matches other tags that start with image like <image2 />.
• XML comments can cause problems.
• Doesn’t handle both <image /> and <image></image>.
• etc…

Some of these are easy to fix, some are more tricky. But in the end it’s not worth spending time improving the regular expression solution to handle all the special cases when the LINQ to XML solution is so simple and does all this for you.