CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexvim
wyc
wyc

Reputation: 55273

Vim: regex to match words inside angle brackets?

I want to match words inside angle brackets (html tags):

<MatchedWord></MartchedWord>

This is what I have so far:

/\v\<\w+\>

The problem is that it matches the <> too and the /.

How to do it so it only matches the word?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2098

Answers (3)

Devon Parsons
Devon Parsons

Reputation: 1288

In a non-vim environment, this is achieved using positive lookbehind and lookahead as such:

/(?<=<).*?(?=>)/

This matches the following:

<test>         // test
</content>     // /content
<div id="box"> // div id="box"
<div id="lt>"> // div id="lt

So as you can see by the final example it's not perfect, but you are using regex on html so you get what you pay for

See the regex in action

Upvotes: 1

Ingo Karkat
Ingo Karkat

Reputation: 172540

You can assert matching before and after text without including that in the match via Vim's special \zs (match start) and \ze (match end) atoms:

/<\/\?\zs\w\+\ze\/\?>

I've included an optional (\?) slash on both side (e.g. </this> and <this/>. Also note that \w\+ isn't a completely correct expression for XML or HTML tags (but it can be a good-enough approximation, depending on your data).

Alternative

For most other regular expression engines, you need to use lookbehind and lookahead to achieve this. Vim has those, too (\@<= and \@=), but the syntax is more awkward, and the matching performance may be poorer.

Upvotes: 5

Jeanno
Jeanno

Reputation: 2859

You dont need to escape angle brackets (square brackets are []) since they are not special characters. You can use capturing groups

<\/?(.+)>

Upvotes: 2

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