in reply to Regex is eating up whitespace

Update: it seems that the missing <c>... tags were the problem, which ate up all character classes. In which case I recommend reading Writeup Formatting Tips.

actual result ( no space before < and after > ):

Actual result when I run your code: the regex doesn't match at all.

If you give us code that produced what you say it does then we might help you to change it so that it produces what you want.