Question

i want to write a regex where it should ignore tag which is present between the string.

e.g.,
here is my string

<p>hi this is a reg<del>U</del><ins>u</ins>lar expression match</p>

i want a regular expression to find “regular” from above string,
the match should find whole word including tags i.e., reg<del>U</del><ins>u</ins>lar

here case can be ignored.

plz help me.. thanks in advance

Answer 1

I don’t think you can get a robust solution in regex. At any rate, it won’t be very readable. Here, in verbose form, is a regex that conforms to your revised specifications. Note that it fails to handle <del> tags that contain any nested tags – that’s impossible to do with nsregularexpressions.

\b        # Start of word
r         # Match r
(?:       # Match either
 <del>    #  <del>
 [^<>]*   #  any characters besides angle brackets
 </del>   #  </del>
|         # or
 <[^<>]*> #  any other tag
)*        # End of alternation
e         # Match e
(?:<del>[^<>]*</del>|<[^<>]*>)*  # etc...
g
(?:<del>[^<>]*</del>|<[^<>]*>)*
u
(?:<del>[^<>]*</del>|<[^<>]*>)*
l
(?:<del>[^<>]*</del>|<[^<>]*>)*
a
(?:<del>[^<>]*</del>|<[^<>]*>)*
r
\b