I want to resolve: <tag>alphabetic characters and space</tag>
I propose this one:
<.*>([A-Za-z]+)</.*>
is this correct?
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It is almost correct in the narrow sense that, once you add the space to the character group, it will match the exact string in your question. Whether it is correct in the more general, and perhaps more useful, sense depends entirely on where you're going with this.NPE– NPE2012-12-06 13:33:20 +00:00Commented Dec 6, 2012 at 13:33
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3stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/… :)Fildor– Fildor2012-12-06 13:35:27 +00:00Commented Dec 6, 2012 at 13:35
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3 Answers
Please, for the sake of whatever poor developer will have to deal with your code after you, please do not try to parse XML with regular expressions.
Use a SAX or DOM parser instead. There are plenty of good guides on the web if you search on Google, but here is a quick example using the standard javax.xml package...
Document doc = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder().parse(xmlFile);
Node node = doc.getElementsByTagName("tag").item(0);
String value = node.getNodeValue();
What if the input is: <tag> something <inner-tag> some other thing </inner-tag> </tag> ?
I'd suggest you to use an XML parser library, e.g. Apache Digester.
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You should add ? character to exclude redundancy selection
<.*?>[A-Za-z ]*</.*?>
