Regex to match the first ending HTMl tag

Question

I am trying to write a regex which match the first ending form tag.

  [^~]* 

The above regex

Answer 1

Just make the pattern non-greedy so that it matches the smallest possible amount of characters instead of the largest possible:

<form[^>]*name="loginForm"[^>]*>[^~]*?</form>

Edit:
Changed .* to [^>]* in the form tag, so that it doesn't match outside the tag.

Answer 2

Use a real parser like DOMDocument, SimpleXML or SimpleHTMLDOM. Regular expressions are not suitable for parsing non-regular languages like HTML.

Answer 3

You should NOT use regular expressions, but parse it with DOM:

Javascript:

var forms = document.getElementsByTagName('form');
forms[0] // is the first form element.

PHP:

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->loadHTML( $html );
$forms = $dom->getElementsByTagName('form');
$first = $forms->item(0); // reference to first form

You can use minidom and ElementTree for Python.