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Asked: 2026-05-10T14:28:16+00:00

I’m working on a regular expression in a .NET project to get a specific

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I’m working on a regular expression in a .NET project to get a specific tag. I would like to match the entire DIV tag and its contents:

<html>    <head><title>Test</title></head>    <body>      <p>The first paragraph.</p>      <div id='super_special'>         <p>The Store paragraph</p>      </div>      </body>   </head>

Code:

    Regex re = new Regex('(<div id='super_special'>.*?</div>)', RegexOptions.Multiline);       if (re.IsMatch(test))         Console.WriteLine('it matches');     else         Console.WriteLine('no match');

I want to match this:

<div id='super_special'>    <p>Anything could go in here...doesn't matter.  Let's get it all</p> </div>

I thought . was supposed to get all characters, but it seems to having trouble with the carriage returns. What is my regex missing?

Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Out-of-the-box, without special modifiers, most regex implementations don’t go beyond the end-of-line to match text. You probably should look in the documentation of the regex engine you’re using for such modifier.

    I have one other advice: beware of greed! Traditionally, regex are greedy which means that your regex would probably match this:

    <div id='super_special'>   I'm the wanted div! </div> <div id='not_special'>   I'm not wanted, but I've been caught too :( </div>

    You should check for a ‘not-greedy’ modifier, so that your regex would stop matching text at the first occurence of </div>, not at the last one.

    Also, as others have said, consider using an HTML parser instead of regexes. It will save you a lot of headache.

    Edit: even a non-greedy regex wouldn’t work as expected either, if <div>s are nested! Another reason to consider using an HTML parser.

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