regex puzzle: finding paragraph before...
 

due to a badly formatted book I was trying to constuct a regex which would find any <p......./p> section which occured immediately beofre a <div, in order to then tweak that found chunk.

but I could not do it.
a find expression like <p class "whatever">(.*)</p>?\s*<div is too greedy - it grabbed a whole load of paragraphs

i.e. from
<p para 1...
<p para 2..
...
<p para n..
< div....

the above regex grabs n paragraphs , is there a way to grab only the nth one , and replace it's CSS class

PS I am still using 0.42 regex

or could I use a .p+div class in CSS ?

<p class="whatever">([^<]*?)</p>\s*<div

thanks - if I read that correctly it's blocking any extra instances of < - will it cope with embedded style things like <em or < i inside of the main p tagged paragraphs ?
e.g. some of the paragraphs have extra embedded styles like:
<p class="calibre2">Without missing a beat, <em class="calibre4">High Wire</em> replies; “Without a job, I think I would head for the stars, to see what’s out there.”</p>

You're right, any <span>, <i> etc. will be not so good. ...

Actually should do it, but test it carefully.

I'm not shure, if regex.dotall will work at 0.42, try to add a (?s) to the search-statement.

>>or could I use a .p+div class in CSS ?
if you realy want to change any <div> which follows a </p>, why not ?

If your paragraphs are contained in single lines with newlines between them you can use your pattern with a slight modification:

Or you can upgrade to 0.5.1, in which .(dot) does not match newlines unless you choose "Regex Dotall" mode, and you can use your original pattern unmodified.

It's pretty hard to fine-tune an expression's (non)greediness in 0.4.2 when the "Minimal Matching" check-box is the only method of control you have over it.

In 0.5.x and higher, I'd use something like:

thanks all, esp for how 0.52 is better than 0.42. I am eventually going to have enough reason to upgrade.

I see that I'm going to have to add a couple of symbols to my limited regex repertoire!

so far I have muddled through without ? or ^

Sigil 0.5.2 search engine has some bugs while searching "all html files". Until 0.5.3 is released I suggest using 0.5.1 instead.

All Sigil 0.5 releases

Seconded

If you need to ADD Existing files, YOU need to use the File: New and not the Instant crash, right-click menu :thumbsup: