[Javascript] regexp - how to exclude a substring?

[Shawn Milo]

One non-regex possibility would be to split the block of text into an
array at every '>' character, or maybe use a loop to find and split at
every '</div>.'

I believe that regex lookaheads and lookbehinds are not supported in
Javascript.

Of course, this is just an 'off the top of my head' idea, and it may
not hold water. I'll think on it some more, and see if I can come up
with something more tangible and elegant. I hope you don't need this
immediately, as my wife and I shall be departing shortly to meet the
future wife of a friend.

Shawn

On 5/21/05, Paul Novitski <paul at novitskisoftware.com> wrote:
> Shawn et al.,
> 
> I'm parsing some HTML using regular expressions but I'm stumped on one point:
> 
> I want to find a string that begins with "<div" and ends with "</div" that
> does not enclose a nested "</div".
> 
> I'm starting by locating a start & end tag pair:
> 
>         /<div.*>.*<\/div/si
> 
> [si = include newlines + case-insensitive]
> 
> I'm actually locating a specific tag using a regexp like this:
> 
>         /<div [^>]*id="target".*>.*<\/div/si
> 
> That finds my starting & closing tags, but if I've got multiple divs it
> finds everything up to & including the final </div on the page.
> 
> Therefore as my next step I need to know how to exclude "</div" from the
> innerHTML of the div.  I've tried (.*(<\/div){0}) but it doesn't seem to work.
> 
> 1) How do I say "allow any number of any characters but don't allow this
> substring"?
> 
> 2) The direction I'm headed is to be able to include all nested divs in my
> target div.  In other words, the range of selected text should include an
> even number of start & end tags of the same tagName as my target tag:
> 
>         <div id="target">
>                 <div>blah he blah</div>
>                 <div>blah he blah
>                         <div>blah he blah</div>
>                 </div>
>         </div>
> 
> I figure that once I solve problem 1) I'll be able to assemble a regular
> expression that allows nested tags (<div...>...</div) at least to some
> reasonable level of nesting.  Any suggestions?
> 
> Thanks,
> Paul
> 
> 
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