Regular Expression: Start from second one

I want to find the second &l开发者_运维问答t;BR> tag and to start the search from there. How can i do it using regular expressions?

<BR>like <BR>Abdurrahman<BR><SMALL>Fathers Name</SMALL>

Prepend <BR>[^<]*(?=<BR>) to your regex, or remove the lookahead part if you want to start after the second <BR>, such as: <BR>[^<]*<BR>.

Find text after the second <BR> but before the third: <BR>[^<]*<BR>([^<]*)<BR>

This finds "waldo" in <BR>404<BR>waldo<BR>.

Note: I specifically used the above instead of the non-greedy .*? because once the above starts not working for you, you should stop parsing HTML with regex, and .*? will hide when that happens. However, the non-greedy quantifier is also not as well-supported, and you can always change to that if you want.

assuming you are using PHP, you can split your string on <BR> using explode

$str='<BR>like <BR>Abdurrahman<BR><SMALL>Fathers Name</SMALL>';
$s = explode("<BR>",$str,3);
$string = end($s);
print $string;

output

$  php test.php
Abdurrahman<BR><SMALL>Fathers Name</SMALL>

you can then use "$string" variable and do whatever you want.

The steps above can be done with other languages as well by using the string splitting methods your prog language has.

this regular expression should math the first two <br />s:

/(\s*<br\s*/?>\s*){2}/i

so you should either replace them with nothing or use preg_match or RegExp.prototype.match to extract the arguments.

In JavaScript:

var afterReplace = str.replace( /(\s*<br\s*\/?>\s*){2}/i, '' );

In PHP

$afterReplace = preg_replace( '/(\s*<br\s*\/?>\s*){2}/i', '', $str );

I'm only sure it'll work in PHP / JavaScript, but it should work in everything...

The usual solution to this sort of problem is to use a "capturing group". Most regular expression systems allow you to extract not only the entire matching sequence, but also sub-matches within it. This is done by grouping a part of the expression within ( and ). For instance, if I use the following expression (this is in JavaScript; I'm not sure what language you want to be working in, but the basic idea works in most languages):

var string = "<BR>like <BR>Abdurrahman<BR><SMALL>Fathers Name</SMALL>";
var match = string.match(/<BR>.*?<BR>([a-zA-Z]*)/);

Then I can get either everything that matched using match[0], which is "<BR>like <BR>Abdurrahman", or I can get only the part inside the parentheses using match[1], which gives me "Abdurrahman".