In the second example you're trying to match <p></p> directly, with an additional assertion. Try /<p>(?=.*?\[tab\]).*?<\/p>/ instead. But that doesn't check if the [tab] occurs before the </p>, so don'T try to mess with lookarounds but use your first pattern.

Update: OK, that doesn't fix your real problem. I'll have to think a bit more about it. In this simple case you can just use [^<>] instead of a dot everywhere between <p> and </p>.

The old truth that HTML shouldn't be parsed with regexes still holds.

In reply to Re: Matching set of paragraph tags with string inside. by moritz
in thread Matching set of paragraph tags with string inside. by the_0ne

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