Jamie in Troubleshooting | February 25, 2011

Regex Challenge

A friend asked for a regex that matches a paragraph that contains only upper-case text inside a nested hierarchy of tags. Some examples:

Matches:


&lt;p class=&quot;abcdefg&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;1.htm&quot;&gt;&lt;span&gt;HELLO THERE&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class=&quot;c8&quot;&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;c7&quot;&gt;BY ERIC D. JAMES, MD&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style=&quot;border:1px solid red&quot;&gt;HELLO DARLING&lt;/p&gt;

Fail:


&lt;p class=&quot;c8&quot;&gt;&lt;span class=&quot;c7&quot;&gt;BY Eric James, MD&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style=&quot;border:1px solid red&quot;&gt;Hello Darling&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p class=&quot;abcdefg&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;1.htm&quot;&gt;&lt;span&gt;HELLO THeRE&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

I came up with the following expression:

/&lt;p[^&gt;]<em>&gt;(&lt;[^&gt;]</em>&gt;)<em>[^a-z&lt;]+(&lt;\/[^p][^&gt;]</em>&gt;)<em>&lt;\/p[^&gt;]</em>&gt;/

It doesn’t handle tags interspersed with text or nested paragraph tags.

Here’s a sample on Rubular.

Jamie

February 25, 2011