Question

I’ve a file containing hundreds of SQL Insert statements. I want to identify only those statements start with HTML paragraph tag <p> but doesn’t have an ending para tag </p>.

I’m trying on these lines

<p>[^\n]*(?!</p>) <-- a <p> followed by any number of characters until \n and then </p>

This does not work. Below is the sample data

INSERT INTO `help` VALUES 
(1,1,'<p>Radiotherapy uses a beam of high&#45;energy rays (or particles) lymph nodes.</p>'),
(2,1,'<p>EBRT delivers radiation from a machine outside the body. '),
(3,1,'<p>Following lumpectomy radiotherapy <ul><li>Heading</li></ul></p>'),

Ideally, I would be appending a </p> where they are not present e.g. in the insert statement #2.

Answer 1

If you use this:

(\(\d+,\d+,'<p>.*?)(</p>)?('\),)

You’ll get back-references to the following parts:

1. (1,1,'<p>Radiotherapy uses a beam of high&#45;energy rays (or particles) lymph nodes. <– ie the preamble, and body text including the opening P tag
2. </p> <– The optional closing P tag.. ie you might not get a match for 2.
3. '), <– the closing quote and parenthesis, and trailing comma

You can then replace this with:

$1</p>$3 (eg using .NET style backreferences).

ie, rebuild the string with each of your backreferences, with an explicit closing P tag regardless of if one was found or not.

Without knowing your platform, I can’t give you the correct regex replace syntax for this.

In .NET it would be:

string input = @"INSERT INTO `help` VALUES 
(1,1,'<p>Radiotherapy uses a beam of high&#45;energy rays (or particles) lymph nodes.</p>'),
(2,1,'<p>EBRT delivers radiation from a machine outside the body. '),
(3,1,'<p>Following lumpectomy radiotherapy <ul><li>Heading</li></ul></p>'),";

Regex r = new Regex(@"(\(\d+,\d+,'<p>.*?)(</p>)?('\),)");
string output = r.Replace(input, "$1</p>$3");

Console.Write(output);

Which produces this output:

INSERT INTO `help` VALUES
(1,1,'<p>Radiotherapy uses a beam of high&#45;energy rays (or particles) lymph nodes.</p>'),
(2,1,'<p>EBRT delivers radiation from a machine outside the body. </p>'),
(3,1,'<p>Following lumpectomy radiotherapy <ul><li>Heading</li></ul></p>'),