Question

The text is:

<div class="left right">Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and</div> typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scramble'd it to make-shift type <a href="google.com">specimen book</a> and something [tag]else[/tag].

Essentially what I’m trying to do is extract all of the words above while abiding by these rules:

1. word can contain dash and apostrophe (scramble’d and make-shift above)
2. word cannot be within a link tag
3. word cannot be within a block tag – [tag]
4. word cannot be part of a tag name or html (class in class=”, div, a, tag etc)

My initial thought is to remove tags and content of those tags I don’t need like a and such. Even then, however, I am finding it hard to say match everything in between the div above, but not match the word ‘div’ or ‘class’ or ‘left right’.

Appreciate any help. I currently have:

\s?[a-zA-Z0-9\'\-]+\s?

Which is shameful, I know.

Answer 1

This will work with the .NET regex engine, but that’s one of the few that support repetition in a negative look-behind.

(?<!<[^>]*)(?<!<a[^<]*)(?<!\[[^\]]*)(?<!\[tag[^[]*)\w[^\s<[]*