Matching duplicate xml tags using regex

Question

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Hello,
i have a problem when matching the following xml:
Regex im using :

<contextualmenu[\s\s]*?><focus[\s\s]*?<Selection[\s\s]*?>/b>

Result is that im capturing both (ContextualMenu) tags while i need to catch each one separately...
Thanks for your help !

XML

<ContextualMenu EventID="23">
            <Focus CaretPosition="0">
                <Selection  zone="Label"/>
            </Focus>
        </ContextualMenu>
        <ActionPerformed EventID="24" >
            <ViewSelection>
                <Selection  zone="Label" />
            </ViewSelection>
        </ActionPerformed>


<ContextualMenu  token="sample"   EventID="10">
            <Focus CaretPosition="0">
                <Selection  zone="Label"/>
            </Focus>
        </ContextualMenu>
        <ActionPerformed EventID="24" >
            <ViewSelection>
                <Selection  zone="Label" />
            </ViewSelection>
        </ActionPerformed>

Posted 29-Apr-11 4:58am

SuperAdministrator

Updated 29-Apr-11 5:02am

v2

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Comments

Sandeep Mewara 29-Apr-11 11:12am

Can you elaborate more on the issue you are facing than what you are trying to do?

3 solutions

Solution 2

You can use LINQ to XML. It is very nice to work with.
LINQ to XML Overview[^]

Posted 29-Apr-11 5:29am

Kim Togo

Comments

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 29-Apr-11 22:20pm

This should give a right idea, my 5.
My approach would be using the XML schema. Also see my general conclusion :-)
--SA

Solution 3

In addition to what Kim and Manfred proposed, I'll add:

You need to create an XML schema and validate XML against the schema, please read this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.xml.schema.xmlschemavalidator.aspx[^].

General conclusion: application of Regex to XML is totally pointless. You don't want to do it!

—SA

Posted 29-Apr-11 16:19pm

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov

Comments

Manfred Rudolf Bihy 2-May-11 6:25am

My 5!

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 2-May-11 7:05am

Thank you, Manfred.
--SA

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Manfred Rudolf Bihy · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-29T05:16:00

Solution 1

Save yourself the pain and use XPath expressions[^] to dissect your XML.
Regular expression are really no good for parsing nested structures.

Best Regards,

-MRB

Posted 29-Apr-11 5:16am

Manfred Rudolf Bihy

v2

Comments

Kim Togo 29-Apr-11 11:28am

Good answer. My 5. Regexp will fail on complex XML and HTML files.

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 29-Apr-11 22:21pm

Agree with you (less sure about XPath for this particular task, probably you though about it), so my 5.
My approach would be XML schema, please see my answer.
--SA

Manfred Rudolf Bihy 2-May-11 6:43am

What I took from OP's question was that he wanted to extract XML tags. Nevertheless validation your XML is always a good thing if you want to be sure that the data you're retrieving conforms to waht is expected.

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 2-May-11 7:16am

Sure.
--SA