Hello,

New to regex and my head is spinning more than the girl in the "Exorcist".

I'm trying to delete a bunch of html code. For example, this seems to work for deleting all the stuff between the first beginning and ending center tags:


After those center tags, there are other center tags further down the html page, with a bunch of other code and text in between, all of which I'd like to delete. So any ideas how to remove everything between the first <center> tag and say maybe the third </center> tag?

In the same vein, is there a simple regex for removing everything in a html page between the first instance of a beginning string and the first instance of another string regardless of the amount of text, lines or code between?

That is, say the first and last strings are:


I've tried more regex expressions than I can remember, and none work (or produce unexpected results), although it's certainly a learning experience.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
ronzo

I'm not sure I quite understand what you are asking... but something like this?


That should return something like;


This is untested, but it should work :)

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

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Hi Andy,

I was wrong... the regex I gave doesn't remove what I wanted. Here's an example of what I'm trying to do:


So basically I want to delete everything on the page from the first center tag (in red) to the final center ending tag (in red). I could do this line by line, but I'd rather just grab everything all at once and get rid of it if that's possible.

Hope that explains it better.
Thanks,
ronzo

What about the modified version? Otherwise I'm afraid I don't have any more ideas :(

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

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When you take out the "?" in the "match anything" expression, you tell Perl to be greedy and match as much as it can, rather than as little as it can. The "s" regular expression modifier is required in order for the match to span multiple lines. The "g" modifier is not required since we will only match once.

try this:

Philip
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Limecat is not pleased.

Hi Philip,

Thanks, that works great!

Just picked up the O'Reilly regex book by Friedl, and found a few good web tutorials. Looks like a potentially long learning curve, but it's certainly going to be worth it, especially after seeing how powerful regex can be.

Thanks again, and thanks also to Andy.

ronzo