Regex to find string inside string inside string

Question

Lets say I need to get a string inside some h1, h2, or h3 tags

/<[hH][1-3][^>]*>(.*?)<\/[hH][1-3]>/

This works great if the user decides to take a sane approach to headers:

<h1>My Header</h1>

but knowing my users, they want bold, italic, underlined h1's. And they have that coding quagmire tinyMCE to help them do it. TinyMCE would output:

<h1><b><span style='text-decoration: underline'><i>My Hideous Header</i></span></b></h1>

So my question is:

How do i get a string inside h1 h2, or h3, and then inside any amount of surrounding other tags as well?

Thanks, Joe

What about this? <h1><b>My <i>Hideous</i> Header</b></h1> Would you want to retrieve the full title string with its embedded <i> tags? — Alan Moore
– Alan Moore, Commented Sep 3, 2009 at 0:06

chaos · Accepted Answer · 2009-09-02 20:57:19Z

3

/<(h[1-3])[^>]*>(?:.*?>)?([^<]+)(?:<.*?)?<\/\1>/i

It will not be too hard to make cases that break it hideously, since (as I'm sure people will tell you) parsing HTML is a job for an HTML parser, not a regex, but it works for your given case and various similar ones.

answered Sep 2, 2009 at 20:57

chaos

125k34 gold badges306 silver badges310 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

Comments

Kamil Szot · Accepted Answer · 2009-09-03 03:24:27Z

1

If you're in php you can use your regex:

/<[hH][1-3][^>]*>(.*?)<\/[hH][1-3]>/

then pass the captured result through strip_tags() function to get rid of all the insanity inside.

If you are not on php you can pass the result through regexp replace that removes tags. Something like replace /<\/?[^>]+?>/ with empty string.

edited Sep 3, 2009 at 3:24

answered Sep 3, 2009 at 3:16

Kamil Szot

17.9k8 gold badges66 silver badges67 bronze badges

Comments

Robert Swisher · Accepted Answer · 2009-09-02 20:58:19Z

-1

If you only want to capture the ultimately nested text you could just drop all tags inside the header tag with:

/<([hH][1-3]).*>(.*?)<.*\/$1>/

Untested, but I think it should work.

answered Sep 2, 2009 at 20:58

Robert Swisher

1,30011 silver badges12 bronze badges

1 Comment

Alan Moore Over a year ago

Nope. (.*?) is allowed to match nothing, and thanks to the greedy .* ahead of it, that's exactly what it does.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Regex to find string inside string inside string

3 Answers 3

Comments

Comments

1 Comment

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

3 Answers 3

Comments

Comments

1 Comment

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related