From: Wes Gamble <weyus@...>
Date: 2006-05-24T03:05:43+09:00
Subject: Regexp help:  Matching HTML having trouble w/greediness

All,

I am attempting to do some matching on some HTML.

Here's what I want:

I want to be able to match any <area> tag which is of the form <area 
...> that does NOT contain a "mailto:" href.  The grouping is for some 
substitution that I'm doing.

Here's my pattern:

/(<area .*?href=['|"])(?!mailto:)(.*?)(['|"].*?>)/mi

What I find is that this pattern will successfully handle most area 
tags, however, when an area tag is followed by a <a> tag (which also has 
a href attribute, it will match everything between <area and the end of 
the <a> tag).  So, for example,

<area href="mailto: xyz@abc.com>other stuff, including tags<a 
href="blah">

this pattern matches all the way through the end of the <a> tag.

I tried to stick a negative lookahead (?!<) at the end of the pattern 
but that doesn't seem to help.

How do I get this pattern to STOP matching?

Thanks for any help,
Wes

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