in reply to Matching set of paragraph tags with string inside.

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.

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Re^2: Matching set of paragraph tags with string inside.
by the_0ne (Pilgrim) on Feb 08, 2008 at 21:02 UTC
    My problem with the first match is it matches too much... 
    original:
"<p>no tabs here</p><p>column 1[tab]column 2</p><p>no tabs here</p>"

result of first regex:
no tabs here</p><p>column 1[tab]column 2

    [download]
    What I want it to match is... 
    column 1[tab]column 2

    [download]
    Since that is the set of para's with the string [tab].
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[d/l]
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      My first shot was too fast, here's a working solution: 
      my $contents = "<p>no tabs here</p><p>column 1[tab]column 2</p><p>no t
+abs here</p>";

if ($contents =~ m{(<p>[^<>]*\[tab\][^<>]*</p>)} ){
    print "Matched '$1'\n;";
}

      [download]
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Re^2: Matching set of paragraph tags with string inside.
by the_0ne (Pilgrim) on Feb 08, 2008 at 21:05 UTC

    I understand your concern of parsing html with regexes, but this string will never be a full set of html. It will have some html (of course with the para's) but using a parser would be overkill for this situation.

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