Java Regex Help

**newbie** · January 25th, 2011, 06:36 PM

I'm currently learning regular expressions, and one of my tasks is to get all text between <body> and </body> of a html file. When <body> and </body> are on the same line I get a result, but the contents of body is supposed to span across multiple lines which in that instance, doesn't return anything as its only checking the one full line?.

What I don't understand is, where in this regex could I put a new line ?
String regex = "<body>.*?</body>"
also, what new line expression should I use? as I've seen examples such as:
\n \\n '\n' ('\u000A')

Thanks.

Any good tutorials would be appreciated as an alternative

**copeg** · January 25th, 2011, 07:14 PM

By default, a dot (".") in a regular expression excludes new lines. Pass Pattern.DOTALL to the Pattern compiler to have dots represent all plus new lines

Pattern patter = Pattern.compile(regex, Pattern.DOTALL);

**newbie** · January 25th, 2011, 07:23 PM

Hmm yeah thanks for that, The description of pattern = Pattern.compile(regex, Pattern.DOTALL);
seems to be what I was after, but unfortunately, It still fails to find a match when <body> and </body> are on different lines.

**copeg** · January 25th, 2011, 07:42 PM

You will have to post an example then (both code and text to parse) that does not work, as it works for me...

**newbie** · January 25th, 2011, 08:07 PM

----VOID----

**copeg** · January 25th, 2011, 09:34 PM

This isn't a problem with the regular expression per se, but how the file is read. If you wish to search for a regular expression across the file, you should read the file in full, and then pass the contents into the regular expression engine. As of right now, you are reading using a scanner, which delims on whitespace, so you feed the regular expression engine the contents of the file word by word, and will never find the body tags.

**JavaPF** · January 26th, 2011, 04:06 AM

May be worth reading - http://www.javaprogrammingforums.com...explained.html

**newbie** · January 26th, 2011, 09:01 AM

Thank you both for your input, I read the file into a StringBuilder, then searched that, which worked a treat

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