asked on

Regular Expression

Hi ,

I am new to regular expressions and need to extract a part of HTML. Does Carriage Return matter? For example

<div id="subnavmaroon">
<ul>
<li class="picborder"><a href="#">Agriculture</a></li>
<li class="picborder"><a href="#">Mining & Exploration</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Petroleum</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

I require a regular expression which will give me

<li class="picborder"><a href="#">Agriculture</a></li>
<li class="picborder"><a href="#">Mining & Exploration</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Petroleum</a></li>

So the innerHtml of the UL tag

Thanks in advance

Andrew

REA_ANDREW

ASKER

so starting

<div id="subnavmaroon">
<ul>

and ending

</ul>
</div>

anything between I need to return

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

der_jth

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REA_ANDREW

ASKER

thank you for getting back to me. I need to replace what it finds with nothing. It is searching a file so it will be over multiple lines.

Thanks

Andrew

der_jth

Yeah, just a small adaptation then:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace ConsoleApplication1 {
class Program {
static void Main(string[] args) {

string input = @"
This is some text to be preserved
<div id=""subnavmaroon"">
<ul>
<li class=""picborder""><a href=""#"">Agriculture</a></li>
<li class=""picborder""><a href=""#"">Mining & Exploration</a></li>
<li><a href=""#"">Petroleum</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
This was after the emptied div";

string result = Regex.Replace(
input,
@"<div id=""subnavmaroon"">\s*<ul>(.*?)</ul>\s*</div>",
@"<div id=""subnavmaroon""></ul></div>",
RegexOptions.Singleline
);

Console.WriteLine(result);
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
}

--

Outputs:

--
This is some text to be preserved
<div id="subnavmaroon"></ul></div>
This was after the emptied div

der_jth

Oops... You'll probably want to throw in a <ul> start tag into the string that is the third argument to Regex.Replace. Of course, if you want to wipe the div as well, just make the third argument an empty string.