From: "s.ross" <cwdinfo@...>
Date: 2008-04-07T10:59:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Regex and non-greedy matching?

Hi--

On Apr 6, 2008, at 4:25 PM, Marc Heiler wrote:

> I have a slight problem. I have strings with some tags such as
>
> '<b><lightblue>name:</></b>'
>
> I need to match "name:" and "lightblue"
> In other words:
>  - What is between <> </>
> and
>  - What is inside the first <> right next to "name:"
>
> The following regex does not work:
>
> '<b><lightblue>name:</></b>' =~ /<([a-zA-Z]+)>(.+?)<\/>/
>
>  $1  # => "b"
>  $2  # => "<lightblue>name:
>
> $2 should only be name:
> and $1 should only be lightblue

You might want to look into hpricot (http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/ 
). It will give you pretty reliable parsing of XML markup. What you  
have here is not valid XML because the closing tag for <lightblue> is  
not </lightblue> but on the chance that it's a typo, I really  
recommend giving hpricot a try.