Extract a substring between two words from a string

Question

I have the following string:

string = "asflkjsdhlkjsdhglk<body>Iwant	o+extr@ctth!sstr|ng<body>sdgdfsghsghsgh"

I would like to extract the string between the two <body> tags. The result I am looking for is:

substring = "<body>Iwant	o+extr@ctth!sstr|ng<body>"

Note that the substring between the two <body> tags can contain letters, numbers, punctuation and special characters.

Is there an easy way of doing this? Thank you!

Matthew Plourde · Accepted Answer

Here is the regular expression way:

regmatches(string, regexpr('<body>.+<body>', string))

Steve P. · Answer

regex = '<body>.+?<body>'

You want the non-greedy (.+?), so that it doesn't group as many <body> tags as possible.

If you're solely using a regex with no auxiliary functions, you're going to need a capturing group to extract what is required, ie:

regex = '(<body>.+?<body>)'

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