Regexes in Depth: Matching Innermost HTML Elements

Update: Please view the updated, syntax-highlighted version of this post on my new blog:

Matching Innermost HTML Elements.

On a regular expression forum I visit every once in awhile, a user asked how he could match all innermost tables within HTML source code. In other words, he wanted to match all tables which did not contain other tables. The regex should match "<table>...</table>", but should only match the inner table within "<table>...<table>...</table>...</table>". This logic needed to support an unlimited amount of nested tables.

One of the resident regex experts quickly claimed that regexes are not suited for parsing nested HTML data, and that this was therefore impossible using regular expressions, period.

It's true that, unless you're working with .NET or Perl, regexes are incapable of recursion (although it's often possible to fake it to an acceptable level). However, when people make claims like that, it encourages me to try to prove otherwise. ;-)

Here's the solution I offered (though there were a few steps to get there):

<table(?:\s[^>]*)?>(?:(?>[^<]+)|<(?!table(?:\s[^>]*)?>))*?</table>

That matches all innermost (or deepest level) tables, and supports an unlimited amount of nesting. It's also very fast, and it can easily be modified to work with other HTML elements (just change the three instances of "table" to whatever element name you want).

To demonstrate, the above regex matches the highlighted text below:

<table><td><table><td>&nbsp;</td></table></td></table> <table><tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr></table> <table></table>

In order to explain how it works, I'll show the progression of gradually more solid regexes I tried along the way to the final result. Here was my first stab at the regex, which is probably easiest to follow (note that it's somewhat flawed):

<table>(?:[\S\s](?!<table>))*?</table>

Basically, the way that works is it matches an opening "<table>" tag, then it looks at each following character one at a time and checks if they are followed by another instance of "<table>" before "</table>". If so, the match fails, because it's not an innermost table.

In theory, at least. Within a couple minutes I realized there was a slight flaw. In order for it to work, there must be at least one character before it encounters a nested table (e.g., "<table>1<table></table></table>" has no problem, but "<table><table></table></table>" would return incorrect results). This is easily fixable by using another negative lookahead immediately after the opening "<table>", but in any case this regex is also slower than it needs to be, since it tests a negative lookahead against every character contained within table tags.

To address both of those issues, I used the following regex:

<table>(?:[^<]+|<(?!table>))*?</table>

First, that increases speed (in theory... you'll see that there are problems with this as is), because within each <table> tag it will greedily jump between all characters which are not "<" in single steps (using "[^<]+"), and it will only use the negative lookahead when it encounters "<". Secondly, it solves the previously noted error by using "<(?!table>)" instead of ".(?!<table>)".

If you're wondering about table tags which contain attributes, that's not a problem. The construct is such that it can easily be extended to support element attributes. Here's an updated regex to accomplish this (the added parts are highlighted in yellow):

<table(?:\s[^>]*)?>(?:[^<]+|<(?!table(?:\s[^>]*)?>))*?</table>

At first I thought this closed the case... The regex supports an unlimited amount of recursion within its context, despite the traditional wisdom that regexes are incapable of recursion. However, one of the forum moderators noted that its performance headed south very quickly when run against certain examples of real world data. This was a result of the regex triggering catastrophic backtracking. Although this is something I should've anticipated (nested quantifiers should always warrant extra attention and care), it's very easy to fix using an atomic grouping or possessive quantifier (I'll use an atomic grouping here since they're more widely supported). The change to the regex is highlighted:

<table(?:\s[^>]*)?>(?:(?>[^<]+)|<(?!table(?:\s[^>]*)?>))*?</table>

And that's it. As a result of all this, the regex not only does its job, but it performs quite impressively. When running it over a source code test case (which previously triggered catastrophic backtracking) containing nearly 100,000 characters and lots of nested tables, it correctly returned all innermost tables in less than 0.01 second on my system.

However, note that neither possessive quantifiers nor atomic groupings are supported by some programming languages, such as JavaScript. If you want to pull this off in JavaScript, a solid approach which is not susceptible to catastrophic backtracking would be:

<table(?:\s[^>]*)?>(?!<table(?:\s[^>]*)?>)(?:[\S\s](?!<table(?:\s[^>]*)?>))*?</table>

That runs just a little bit slower than (but produces the same result as) the earlier regex which relied on an atomic grouping.

If you have a copy of RegexBuddy (and if you don't, I highly recommend it), run these regexes through RegexBuddy's debugger for an under-the-hood look at how they're handled by a regex engine.

Edit: Using a trick I just stumbled upon (which I'll have to blog about in a second), the regex can be rewritten in a way that does not rely on an atomic grouping but is nearly as fast as the one that does:

<table(?:\s[^>]*)?>(?:(?=([^<]+))\1|<(?!table(?:\s[^>]*)?>))*?</table>

Basically, that uses a capturing group inside a positive lookahead followed by "\1" to act just like an atomic group!