Java Regex match
not preceded by

Question

Title says it I guess, I want to match all </li> tags not proceeded <br/>, my try was this:

^(?!<br\/>$).*$<li>

but it won't work. Any tipps?

You might want to explain what you are wanting to do. This sounds like a job that needs to be working with the DOM, not the raw HTML source. — chrylis -cautiouslyoptimistic-, Aug 09 '13 at 09:53
When you write “not preceeded”, you mean, “not _immediately_ preceeded”, or that there was no `
` anywhere before the `

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:28

5

You don't need that .*$ in between. Specially that anchor is doing the danger. In fact you don't need anchors at all in the regex, unless you are testing for <br /> at the beginning of the string.

And you are testing against <li> and not </li>.

Also (?!...) is for negative look-ahead. For look-behind, you should use: (?<!...)

Try using this regex:

"(?<!<br/>)</li>"   // You don't need to escape `/`

Note that, for more complicated cases of HTML parsing, you should avoid using Regex. Use an HTML parser instead. For Java, you can take a look at - JSoup

edited May 23 '17 at 12:28

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answered Aug 09 '13 at 09:50

Rohit Jain

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Thank you, that regex works. I know Jsoup, but this is just for one special case im my Html code. – fweigl Aug 09 '13 at 09:57
@Ascorbin. As far as just this case is concerned, it's ok to use regex. – Rohit Jain Aug 09 '13 at 09:58

Java Regex match not preceded by

1 Answers1

Java Regex match
not preceded by