Regex to match all HTML tags except and

Question

I need to match and remove all tags using a regular expression in Perl. I have the following:

<\\\\??(?!p).+?>

But this still matche

Answer 1

Since HTML is not a regular language I would not expect a regular expression to do a very good job at matching it. They might be up to this task (though I'm not convinced), but I would consider looking elsewhere; I'm sure perl must have some off-the-shelf libraries for manipulating HTML.

Anyway, I would think that what you want to match is non-greedily (I don't know the vagaries of perl's regexp syntax so I cannot help further). I am assuming that \s means whitespace. Perhaps it doesn't. Either way, you want something that'll match attributes offset from the tag name by whitespace. But it's more difficult than that as people often put unescaped angle brackets inside scripts and comments and perhaps even quoted attribute values, which you don't want to match against.

So as I say, I don't really think regexps are the right tool for the job.