Regex Fails to Match Complex Nested HTML Tags in Java
I'm writing unit tests and I'm working on a personal project and I'm having trouble with I'm trying to implement I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here, but I'm working on a Java application where I need to extract specific nested HTML tags from a block of text... The HTML structure is quite simple, but I've come across a scenario where the regex fails to match when there are overlapping tags or unclosed tags. Here's a snippet of the HTML I'm trying to parse: ```html <div> <p>This is a <strong>nested <em>example</em></strong> paragraph.</p> <p>Another <strong>paragraph</strong> here.</p> <div> <p>Unclosed tags <strong> </div> </div> ``` I initially tried using the following regex pattern: ```java String regex = "<p>(.*?)</p>"; ``` However, when I apply it, I only get matches for the properly closed tags, and it completely ignores any text between overlapping or unclosed tags. I get a `PatternSyntaxException` when I try to use greedy matching, and it doesn't seem to work well with nested structures either. I tried switching to a more complex pattern but ended up with no matches or unexpected results. To troubleshoot, I used the `Pattern` and `Matcher` classes in Java: ```java Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(regex); Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(htmlString); while (matcher.find()) { System.out.println(matcher.group(1)); } ``` I expected to extract both nested and adjacent tags, but my output only includes text from properly closed tags. Is there a better regex approach for this situation, or should I consider using an HTML parser library like JSoup instead? Are there any performance concerns with regex for larger HTML documents, and would that justify switching to a parser? Any insights would be appreciated! My development environment is Linux. Any ideas what could be causing this? Thanks, I really appreciate it! This is happening in both development and production on Ubuntu 22.04. Has anyone dealt with something similar? I'm working with Java in a Docker container on Debian. Any feedback is welcome!