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

The original regex can be made to work with very little effort:

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

The problem was that the /? (or \?) gave up what it matched when the assertion after it failed. Using a non-backtracking group (?>...) around it takes care that it never releases the matched slash, so the (?!p) assertion is always anchored to the start of the tag text.

(That said I agree that generally parsing HTML with regexes is not the way to go).