From: Robert Dober <robert.dober@...>
Date: 2006-05-24T04:52:20+09:00
Subject: Re: Regexp help: Matching HTML having trouble w/greediness

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On 5/23/06, Wes Gamble <weyus@att.net> wrote:
>
> 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=3D['|"])(?!mailto:)(.*?)(['|"].*?>)/mi


Let's try
 <area [^>]*?etc.
You will find out that this will solve this particular problem but creates
other ones like e.g. with this HTML
 <area some_att=3D">" href=3D"mine:home">
unless, and you tell me, that is not legal HTML
anyway I feel that maybe Regexen are not the right tool for your task
anymore, dunno.
But maybe you can work with the above regex anyway.
Cheers
Robert

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=3D"mailto: xyz@abc.com>other stuff, including tags<a
> href=3D"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
>
> --
> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
>
>


--=20
Deux choses sont infinies : l'univers et la b=EAtise humaine ; en ce qui
concerne l'univers, je n'en ai pas acquis la certitude absolue.

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