Need help coming up with another regular expression

[bfollowell]

I'm having trouble coming up with a regular expression that will work for what I need to do in Sigil. I downloaded a regex cheatsheet and have learned to use some very basic regular expressions but it seems like I run into trouble and have to learn something new every time I try something else.

Here's what I'm wanting to do and what I've tried.
The following string is typical of a chapter subtitle and the first paragraph of a book I'm working on. Most chapters are identical to this except for the actual text of the subtitle.

<p class="chaptersubtitle">An Army of Shadows</p>

<p class="para">

I want to be able to search for this string, regardless of what the actual subtitle text is.

I've tried:

<p class="chaptersubtitle">[:print:]</p>

<p class="calibre1">

and

<p class="chaptersubtitle">[:alnum:]</p>

<p class="calibre1">

but these don't seem to work.

Do any of you regular expression gurus have any ideas?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

- Byron

[theducks]

Originally Posted by bfollowell

I'm having trouble coming up with a regular expression that will work for what I need to do in Sigil. I downloaded a regex cheatsheet and have learned to use some very basic regular expressions but it seems like I run into trouble and have to learn something new every time I try something else.

Here's what I'm wanting to do and what I've tried.
The following string is typical of a chapter subtitle and the first paragraph of a book I'm working on. Most chapters are identical to this except for the actual text of the subtitle.

<p class="chaptersubtitle">An Army of Shadows</p>

<p class="para">

I want to be able to search for this string, regardless of what the actual subtitle text is.

I've tried:

<p class="chaptersubtitle">[rint:]</p>

<p class="calibre1">

and

<p class="chaptersubtitle">[:alnum:]</p>

<p class="calibre1">

but these don't seem to work.

Do any of you regular expression gurus have any ideas?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

- Byron

<p class="chaptersubtitle">(.+)</p>\s+<p class="para">

Take care with your replace

<p class="chaptersubtitle">\1</p> <p class="para">

You need to put back or modify all the Search terms. the \1 places the contents of the first ( ).
(I put it all back in my example)

NB Tidy will take care of the newline between the closeing </p> and the next tag

[bfollowell]

Thank you very much.

Well, this is certainly getting me closer to what I wanted than what I was trying. Now here's the problem. I only want to select the first chaptersubtitle class paragraph through the very next (first) normal paragraph tag. The expression you gave me selects pretty much ALL text, every single paragraph, character, whatever, through the last <p class="para"> tag.

There may not be a way to have a regular expression do what I'm wanting from the behavior I'm seeing.

Either way, I really appreciate your help. If you have any other ideas, let me know. Are you aware of any decent online resources for learning more about regular expressions?

Thanks again.

- Byron

[theducks]

Originally Posted by bfollowell

Thank you very much.

Well, this is certainly getting me closer to what I wanted than what I was trying. Now here's the problem. I only want to select the first chaptersubtitle class paragraph through the very next (first) normal paragraph tag. The expression you gave me selects pretty much ALL text, every single paragraph, character, whatever, through the last <p class="para"> tag.

There may not be a way to have a regular expression do what I'm wanting from the behavior I'm seeing.

Either way, I really appreciate your help. If you have any other ideas, let me know. Are you aware of any decent online resources for learning more about regular expressions?

Thanks again.

- Byron

Tick the "minimal matching" (Sigils REGEX, non-Greedy) , that should stop it at the first match (but not always )

[bfollowell]

Worked like a charm. Thanks again for your help. Now I need to go add this to my really, really big book of regex info...

[st_albert]

Keep in mind that Sigil's dialect of regex is most like the PERL dialect rather than the POSIX dialect, when you consult your cheat-sheet.

And I, for one, say Gottseidank for that.

[Jellby]

Sigil's regex is still Qt's QRegExp, isn't it? Then better refer to the correct doc, which I believe is: http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.7/qregexp.html

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Sigil's regex is still Qt's QRegExp, isn't it? Then better refer to the correct doc, which I believe is: http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.7/qregexp.html

Correct.