Quote:
Originally Posted by ldolse
A few other useful expressions:
Matching p tags with any styles/ids:
<p[^]*> |
Don't you mean '<p[^>]*>'? Also, this won't work if any of the internal attributes contain a > character. Consider <p foo=">">.
This exposes one of the problems with regular expressions. Using regexps, it is difficult to do delimited matching in the constrained case, and impossible in the general case. Doing it right usually requires a recursive state machine, which by definition cannot be described by a regular expression. For fun, try to write a regular expression that matches any palindrome. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palindrome. Examples: abcdedcba or 'madam im adam' with spaces ignored.) You will fail.
Edit: the paragraph above deals with computational theory and does not belong in a tutorial. However, it might be useful for Manichean, which is why I added it.