How do I marry this range of elements?

Question

How do I pick up a text between these two elements, for example:

a) texto <br /> texto texto texto <br />

I’d like to take what’s between a) and the <br /> of the end, only the end:

"texto <br /> texto texto texto"

https://regexr.com/3hdei

Answer 1

It’s much easier to remove what you don’t want:

• ^a\)\s* at the beginning, or
• \s*<br\s*/?>\s*$ in the end.

So:

^a\)\s*|\s*<br\s*/?>\s*$

using the function replace() with the flags global and ignorecase.

Or, if there are several <br> in the end:

^a\)\s*|\s*(?:<br\s*/?>\s*)+$

---

Being that it is using classic ASP:

Dim texto : texto = "a) texto <br /> texto texto texto <br />"

'RegEx
Set re = New RegExp
re.Global = true
re.IgnoreCase = true
re.Pattern = "^a\)\s*|\s*(?:<br\s*/?>\s*)+$"

texto = re.Replace(texto, "")

Set re = Nothing

Response.Write(texto)

Answer 2

Since no one has yet published an answer on how to do this in Javascript pure, I’ll be leaving my answer here too in case anyone needs it.

var txt = "a) texto <br /> texto texto texto <br />";
/a\)(.*)<br\s?\/>/.exec(txt)[1].trim(); // texto <br /> texto texto texto

Or

var txt = "a) texto <br /> texto texto texto <br />";
var rgx = /a\)(.*)<br\s?\/>/;
var res = rgx.exec(txt)[1].trim(); // texto <br /> texto texto texto

Explanation

---

Regex

/a\)(.*)<br\s?\/>/

• a\) - Looking for a)
• (.*) - Make a capture group with all found terms (.*) except for the \n, that can be captured with [^] if necessary (or [\S\s], if you are not working with Javascript).
• <br\s?\/> - Looking for <br/> or <br />

---

Javascript

When using /(.*)/ as a regular expression, the compiler will create a capture group, which is the place where text will be stored. So we can put texts before and after to limit the capture.
To return the text of an expression, use:

/exemplo/.exec(texto)[0]

In place of 0, you can switch to the created capture group. In your regex, for example, the number is used 1 to reference the group.

Already the method String#trim() was used to remove the beginning and end spaces. (optional)

Answer 3

Maybe not the best answer, but it works as you wish. I used this Regex below:

a\)\s.*(?=\s<)

Will return:

a) texto <br /> texto texto texto

Then I make a replace in the a), just staying:

texto <br /> texto texto texto

resultado = $('#texto1')
            .text()
            .match(/a\)\s.*(?=\s<)/)
            .toString()
            .replace('a) ','');

$('#texto2').text(resultado);

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
Texto original:
<br />
<textarea id="texto1" style="display: inline-block; width: 350px; height: 50px;">
Texto texto texto texto
a) texto <br /> texto texto texto <br />
b) texto <br /> texto texto texto <br />
</textarea>
<br />
Texto capturado:
<br />
<textarea id="texto2" style="display: inline-block; width: 350px; height: 20px; background: yellow;">
</textarea>