Matching Multi-line Regex in BBEdit

Casey Bisson — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 22:17:57 +0000

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:

 
      
         
            am
            Scottish Gaelic
         
      
      
         
            an
            English,
            Irish,
            Scots,
            Scottish Gaelic,
            Yiddish
         
      
      
         
            an t-
            Irish,
            Scottish Gaelic

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.

RegEx Reference

Casey Bisson — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 04:53:00 +0000

Regular expressions are a pain. Jan Goyvaerts’ RegEx Reference helps.

In a related tip, the following will eliminate any non-numeric components in a string: ereg_replace(“[^0-9]”, “”, $string) . I guess I’ll have to admit that I’d not used the exclusion operator before (the carrot immediately following a square bracket). Now I know.

tags: ereg_replace, exclusion operator, php, regex, regex reference, regular expressions

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Matching Multi-line Regex in BBEdit

RegEx Reference