Find everything between two XML tags with RegEx

Question

In RegEx, I want to find the tag and everything between two XML tags, like the following:

Answer 1

this can capture most outermost layer pair of tags, even with attribute in side or without end tags

(<!--((?!-->).)*-->|<\w*((?!\/<).)*\/>|<(?<tag>\w+)[^>]*>(?>[^<]|(?R))*<\/\k<tag>\s*>)

edit: as mentioned in comment above, regex is always not enough to parse xml, trying to modify the regex to fit more situation only makes it longer but still useless

Answer 2

It is not good to use this method but if you really want to split it with regex

<primaryAddress.*>((.|\n)*?)<\/primaryAddress>

the verified answer returns the tags but this just return the value between tags.

Answer 3

In our case, we receive an XML as a String and need to get rid of the values that have some "special" characters, like &<> etc. Basically someone can provide an XML to us in this form:

<notes>
  <note>
     <to>jenice & carl </to>
     <from>your neighbor <; </from>
  </note>
</notes>

So I need to find in that String the values jenice & carl and your neighbor <; and properly escape & and < (otherwise this is an invalid xml if you later pass it to an engine that shall rename unnamed).

Doing this with regex is a rather dumb idea to begin with, but it's cheap and easy. So the brave ones that would like to do the same thing I did, here you go:

    String xml = ...
    Pattern p = Pattern.compile("<(.+)>(?!\\R<)(.+)</(\\1)>");
    Matcher m = p.matcher(xml);
    String result = m.replaceAll(mr -> {
        if (mr.group(2).contains("&")) {
            return "<" + m.group(1) + ">" + m.group(2) + "+ some change" + "</" + m.group(3) + ">";
        }
        return "<" + m.group(1) + ">" + mr.group(2) + "</" + m.group(3) + ">";
    });

Answer 4

It is not a good idea to use regex for HTML/XML parsing...

However, if you want to do it anyway, search for regex pattern

<primaryAddress>[\s\S]*?<\/primaryAddress>

and replace it with empty string...

Answer 5

You should be able to match it with: /<primaryAddress>(.+?)<\/primaryAddress>/

The content between the tags will be in the matched group.