Re: Pattern matching question

On Wednesday, 15 August 2012 14:30:27 UTC-3, Ben Fritz wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 15, 2012 10:39:21 AM UTC-5, jcordes wrote:
>
> > I am working on an HTML file generated by WordPerfect's Publish to HTML, trying to get clean html but maintaining the format fairly closely. One thing I'd like to do is delete empty tag pairs, such as this:
>
> > <SPAN STYLE="text-decoration: underline"></SPAN>
>
> >
>
> > I'm sure this must be a trivial regex problem for some but I'm apparently missing some key idea. I'm working under Linux, with
>
> > VIM - Vi IMproved 7.1 (2007 May 12, compiled Oct 17 2008 18:11:28)
>
> > (sorry, not easy to upgrade)
>
> > I have tried search patterns along the following lines
>
> > /<SPAN .\{-}><\/SPAN>
>
>
>
> The problem is that even though you're using non-greedy, "non-greedy" just means "as few as possible to make it match". E.g. this will match:
>
>
>
> <SPAN>abcdef</SPAN><SPAN></SPAN>
>
>
>
> because the .\{-} matches any character at all, and therefore matches very happily on the ">abcdef</SPAN><SPAN" text.
>
>
>
> Try this instead, explicitly asking for any character which is NOT a '>':
>
>
>
> <SPAN[^>]*><\/SPAN>
>
>
>
> Or this variant, also allowing line breaks:
>
>
>
> <SPAN\_[^>]*><\/SPAN>

Ben,
Thank you very much. That does indeed appear to solve the problem -- your speedy response much appreciated.
Anyone else reading can probably tell from the followup I made to my own post shows that I have confused myself quite thoroughly on this point!
John

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