Regex: To pull out a sub-string between two tags in a string

Question

I have a file in the following format:

Data Data
Data
[Start]
Data I want
[End]
Data

I\'d like to grab the Data I want from between the

Answer 1

Well, if you guarantee that each start tag is followed by an end tag then the following would work.

\[start\](.*?)\[end\]

However, If you have complex text such as the follwoing:

[start] sometext [start] sometext2 [end] sometext [end]

then you would run into problems with regex.

Now the following example will pull out all the hot links in a page:

'/<a(.*?)a>/i'

In the above case we can guarantee that there would not be any nested cases of:

'<a></a>'

So, this is a complex question and can't just be solved with a simple answer.

Answer 2

Refer to this question to pull out text between tags with space characters and dots (.)

[\S\s] is the one I used

Regex to match any character including new lines

Answer 3

\[start\]\s*(((?!\[start\]|\[end\]).)+)\s*\[end\]

This should hopefully drop the [start] and [end] markers as well.