regex multiline text between tags

Question

i'm trying to pull out all the text between the tags usng this expression  (.*?)  this works fine of the tags and the text are on one line but doesn't work (as in all html pages) if the tags and text are on multiple lines. help much appreciated sdix

simondixon · Answer

Thanks suman sdix

tsuman_in · Answer

to get mutiple lines you can use regex.MultiLine. Also make sure that you're doing a global search. The best tool for testing your regular experssions was a freebie on code-project called expresso. http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/expresso.asp?target=expresso test out your regular expressions here. Sometimes it's easier than you think. Also a great flash card of javascript/perl regular expressions (which basically applies to .NET ones) was made by a company called VisiBone http://www.visibone.com/javascript/card.html for some odd reason they let you get a closeup of it which is a HUGE image that you can print out and have for free! If you need help with the .NET side you might want to supply a little code snippet.

simondixon · Answer

Sorry should have made myself clearer(i'm a newbie to c# actually this is my first windows app). I was just using the above example to get a bit of code working that needs to do this: A client has a very large(400+ pages) plain HTML site built in dreamweaver with templates so all content content is between and in the html. I need to be able to pull out the content and store it elsewhere (probably XML) for use in their new re-deisgned site. I'm building a crawler using(WebRequest and WebResponse) to grab all of the content and follow links throughout the site. Regex seemed the logical choice to grab the content links title etc. But i couldn't grab multiple lines even with a simple Regex as above(hence the simpified example in my post) More help would be great cheers si

tsuman_in · Answer

why do that when you can use the dom to get everything in the body tag out? with javascript you can say document.body.innerHTML If you're trying to retrieve everything from the page server side then put an id and a runat=server on the body tag. It's an htmlGeneric control. you can get innerHtml from it server-side.