Question

I’m trying to write a regex to match patterns like this:

<td style="alskdjf" />

i.e. a self terminating <td>

but not this:

<td style=alsdkjf"><br /></td>

I initially came up with:

<td\s+.*?/>

but that obviously fails on the second example and I thought that something like this might work:

<td\s+.*?[^>]/>

but it doesn’t. I’m using C#.NET.

Only looking for <td>‘s that have an attribute. e.g. looking for <td style="alsdfkj" /> but not <td>.

Answer 1

This will match what you’re looking for, and not match the problematic case you had with your first few tries:

<td[^>]*?/>

Note, however, that if you need to allow > characters in attribute values, you’d need something like this:

<td(?:[^>]|"[^"]*?")*?/>

Which allows > only within matching double-quotes (you could similarly expand it to allow single-quotes).

You can add whatever specific attribute you’re looking for into the regex; for instance for your example:

<td[^>]*? style="alskdjf"[^>]*?/>