Regular expression for finding class names in HTML

Question

I\'d like to use grep to find out if/where an html class is used across a bunch of files. The regex pattern should find not only

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Answer 1

Don't do it. It will drive you insane: RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags

Instead, use a HTML parser. It's not hard.

EDIT: Here's an example in PowerShell

Get-ChildItem -Recurse *.html | where { 
    ([xml](Get-Content $_)).SelectNodes( '//*' ) | where { $_.GetAttribute( "class" ).Contains( "foo" ) } 
}

Answer 2

How about something like this:

grep -Erno 'class[ \t]*=[ \t]*"[^"]+"' *

That will also allow for more whitespace and should give you output similar to:

1:class="foo bar baz"
3:class = "haha"

To see all classes used, you can pipe output from the above into the following:

cut -f2 -d'"' | xargs | sort | uniq

Answer 3

Regular expressions are a pretty poor tool for parsing HTML. Try looking into simpleXML ( http://php.net/manual/en/book.simplexml.php ). Roll-your-own regEx on HTML is begging for trouble.

Answer 4

Depends what metacharacters your grep supprts, try:

'class=\"([a-z]+ ?)+\"'