Regex select all text between tags
You can use "<pre>(.*?)</pre>", (replacing pre with whatever text you want) and extract the first group (for more specific instructions specify a language) but this assumes the simplistic notion that you have very simple and valid HTML.
As other commenters have suggested, if you're doing something complex, use a HTML parser.
Tag can be completed in another line. This is why \n needs to be added.
<PRE>(.|\n)*?<\/PRE>
This is what I would use.
(?<=(<pre>))(\w|\d|\n|[().,\-:;@#$%^&*\[\]"'+–/\/®°⁰!?{}|`~]| )+?(?=(</pre>))
Basically what it does is:
(?<=(<pre>)) Selection have to be prepend with <pre> tag
(\w|\d|\n|[().,\-:;@#$%^&*\[\]"'+–/\/®°⁰!?{}|~]| ) This is just a regular expression I want to apply. In this case, it selects letter or digit or newline character or some special characters listed in the example in the square brackets. The pipe character | simply means "OR".
+? Plus character states to select one or more of the above - order does not matter. Question mark changes the default behavior from 'greedy' to 'ungreedy'.
(?=(</pre>)) Selection have to be appended by the </pre> tag
Depending on your use case you might need to add some modifiers like (i or m)
- i - case-insensitive
- m - multi-line search
Here I performed this search in Sublime Text so I did not have to use modifiers in my regex.
Javascript does not support lookbehind
The above example should work fine with languages such as PHP, Perl, Java ...Javascript however does not support lookbehind so we have to forget about using `(?))` and look for some kind of workaround. Perhaps simple strip the first four chars from our result for each selection like in here https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11592033/regex-match-text-between-tags
Also look at the JAVASCRIPT REGEX DOCUMENTATION for non-capturing parentheses
To exclude the delimiting tags:
(?<=<pre>)(.*?)(?=</pre>)
(?<=<pre>) looks for text after <pre>
(?=</pre>) looks for text before </pre>
Results will text inside pre tag
use the below pattern to get content between element. Replace [tag] with the actual element you wish to extract the content from.
<[tag]>(.+?)</[tag]>
Sometime tags will have attributes, like anchor tag having href, then use the below pattern.
<[tag][^>]*>(.+?)</[tag]>