C# regex html table inside a table

I am using the follow regex:

(<(table|h[1-6])[^>]*>(?<op>.+?)<\/(table|h[1-6])>)

to extract tables (and headings) from a html document.

I've found it to work quite well in the documents we are using (documents converted with word save as filtered html), however I have a problem that if the table contains a table inside it the regex will match the initial table start tag and the second table end tag rath开发者_C百科er than the initial table end tag.

Is there a way in regex to specify that if it finds another table tag within the match to keep to ignore the next match of and go for the next one and so on?

Don't do this.

HTML is not a regular grammar and so a regular expression is not a good tool with which to parse it. What you are asking in your last sentence is for a contextual parser, not a regular expression. Bare regular expression parsing it is too likely fail to parse HTML correctly to be responsible coding.

HtmlAgilityPack is a MsPL-licensed solution I've used in the past that has widely acceptable license terms and provides a well-formed DOM which can be probed with XPath or manipulated in other useful ways ("Extract all text, dropping out tags" being a popular one for importing HTML mail for search, for example, that is nigh trivial after letting a DOM parser rip through the HTML and only coding the part that adds value for your specific business case).

Is there a way in regex to specify that if it finds another table tag within the match to keep to ignore the next match of and go for the next one and so on?

Since nobody's actually answered this part, I will—No.

This is part of what makes regular languages "regular". A regular language is one that can be recognized by a certain regular grammar, often described in syntax that looks very much like basic regular expressions (10* to match 1 followed by any number of 0s), or a DFA. "Regular Expressions" are based strongly off of these regular languages, as their name implies, but add some functions such as lookaheads and lookbehinds. As a general rule, a regular language knows nothing about what's around it or what it's seen, only what it's looking at currently, and which of its finite states it's in.

TLDNR: Why does this matter to you? Since a regular language cannot "count" elements in that way, it is impossible to keep a tally of the number of <table> and </table> elements you have seen. An HTML Parser does just that - since it is not trying to emulate a regular language, it can count the number of opening and closing tags it sees.

This is the prime example of why it's best not to use regular expressions to parse HTML; even though you know how it may be formed, you cannot parse it since there may be nested elements. If you could guarantee there would be no nested tables, it may be feasible to do this, but even then, using a parser would be much simpler.

_{Plea to the theoretical computer scientists: I did my best to explain what I know from the CS Theory classes I've taken in a way that most people here should be able to understand. I know that regular languages can "count" finite numbers of things. Feel free to correct me, but please be kind!}

Regular expressions are not really suited for this as what you're trying to do contains knowledge about the fact that this is a nested language. Without this knowledge it will be really hard (and also hard to read and maintain) to extract this information.

Maybe do something with an XPath navigator?