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I have a regular expression that breaks html into necessary for me peaces. I will not present the whole regex, because it's too long. In a nutshell, its a multi-line table cells row-by-row parser. Recently i've ran into a trouble: the layout of parsing pages has changed, so I started remastering the regex to fit new layout, but I've found that layout wrapping data I need in a particular cell in some rows may differ.

What do we have?

The layout of the cell may be like this or like this

which leads me to question: how do I capture needed data and do not have additional unnecessary group?

Conditions in regexps described here regular-expressions.info/conditional.html, I've read it but still don't have a clue.

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This should help :)

<td class='(?:class1|class2)'>\s*((?=\w).*)\s*</td>
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2 Comments

Thanks for your support and updating your answer accordingly :)
Thank you. Your regexp perfectly fits.
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Edited: took over regexhacks expression, as it is a solution that is better.

Not sure, but maybe you are looking for non-capturing groups used as (?:). Thus you could do 

<td class='class(?:1|2)'>\s*((?=\w).*)\s*</td>

Well, in this example you would not need the groups:

<td class='class[12]'>\s*((?=\w).*)\s*</td>

but in more complex cases you could use them.

See sample: rubular

But this might not be what you want. Could you give a more precise example of the problem?

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Thank you for respond. I think now I starting understand how conditional regexps work.

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