TLDR for <li> </li>:
<[/\n\r]*li[^>]*>
I’m web scraping with Python and BeautifulSoup on some very unconventional code and I needed to find out how nested a set of unordered lists is. I would think that VSCode has a way of tracking opening and closing HTML tags but I wasn’t seeing it (Let me know if there’s a method or plugin that I’m missing). The next best thing I could think of was to use a regex to search. I haven’t had much practice with Regular Expressions but was able to piece this query together from several Stack Overflow answers and the documentation.
To search for an opening list tag is a straightforward…
<li>
If you want opening <li> and closing </li> tags you need…
<[/]*li> (the star ignores anything in the preceding square brackets)
And since some tags have more information like <li class="some-class"> you need to add…
<[/]*li[^>]*>
I’ll be totally honest about this last addition [^>]*. My best understanding is that it’s essentially a double-negative. It’s saying match everything ^ except the greater-than > symbol and then the asterisk * after the square brackets tells you to ignore everything you’ve found other than that closing >.
And finally, since some of the opening <li> tags in the code I was searching extended over multiple lines I had to add \n newline characters and return characters \r as other characters to ignore upfront.
So the final code ends up being….
<[/\n\r]*li[^>]*>
Happy Searching!