Matching Multi-line Regex in BBEdit
I love BBEdit on my Mac, but I was left scratching my head again today when I was trying to remember how to make its regex engine match a pattern across multiple lines. My hope was to extract a list of initial articles from a page that had HTML like this:
<table>
<tr>
<td valign="top" colspan="34" align="left">am</td>
<td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">Scottish Gaelic</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table>
<tr>
<td valign="top" colspan="34" align="left">an</td>
<td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">English,</td>
<td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">Irish,</td>
<td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">Scots,</td>
<td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">Scottish Gaelic,</td>
<td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">Yiddish</td>
</tr>
</table>
<table>
<tr>
<td valign="top" colspan="34" align="left">an t-</td>
<td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">Irish,</td>
<td valign="top" colspan="10" align="left">Scottish Gaelic</td>
</tr>
</table>Indeed, it has well over 100 tables like that, and I was looking for the contents of the first TD in each. The following regex does it:
(?s)[^<]*<table>[^<]*<tr>[^<]*<td[^>]*>([^<]*)</td>.*?</table>
The most significant part of this is the (?s) at the beginning that tells BBEdit to match the pattern across line breaks. A more ninja-like regex assassin would probably be able to do it better, but this worked.
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On windows, I use biterscripting to parse across multiple lines. Just read in the contents of the entire file into a string variable.
For example, I have a file page.html. I want to extract a blcok starting at .
var str content ; cat page.html > $content
stex -r “^^” $content
The above will extract the block across multiple lines.
For example,
stex -r “^^” “a\n\nd”
will extract “” .
Have fun with regular expressions.
Patrick