In Part 1 we looked at the difference between greedy and non-greedy repetition matching with regular expressions. We also started a coding example. In this part we'll finish out our coding example, look at another coding example, and wrap the article up!
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At this point we have all of our regular expression "matches" stored in a collection, objMatches
.
Since objMatches
is just an ordinary collection, we can do a number of things at this point:
we can iterate through the collection with a For Each ... Next
, we can access a particular match
randomly, etc. If the HTML document lacked a title, the objMatches.Count
property will return
zero. Else, we have found a title and want to display it. Keep in mind that the regular expression engine
will return the both the delimiters and the text between them. So, if /SomePage.htm
contained a title tag like: <TITLE>Hello, World!</TITLE>
, the resulting match would
be exactly that... not just "Hello, World!" For that reason, before displaying the title, we need
to strip it out. (For that we'll use the Mid
function, a standard VBScript string function.)
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Another example of using the non-greedy repetition regular expression feature is listing all of the text that appears between bold tags (or italics, or underlined, or whatnot). To accomplish this, we simply need to alter our regular expression:
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Now, instead of just outputting a specifc match in the objMatches
collection, let's list
each match:
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I hope this article has proved to be both interesting and educational! Remember, for the non-greedy repetition regular expressions to work, you will need the VBScript Scripting Engine 5.5 or higher. Again, to download the latest version of the VBScript Scripting Engine visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/scripting/; to determine what server-side scripting engine version you're using, be sure to read: Determining the Server-Side Scripting Language and Version!
Happy Programming!
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