I seem to have to perpetually relearn Regex & Grep syntax every time I need something advanced. This time, even with BBEDIT's pattern playground, I can't work this one out.
I need to do a multi-line search for the occurrence of two literal asterisks anywhere in the text between a pair of tags in a plist/XML file.
I can successfully construct a lookbetween so:
(?s)(?<=<array>).*?(?=</array>)
I try to limit that to only match occurrences in which two asterisks appear between tags:
(?s)(?<=<array>).*?[*]{2}.*?(?=</array>)
(?s)(?<=<array>).+[*]{2}.+(?=</array>)
(?s)(?<=<array>).+?[*]{2}.+?(?=</array>)
But they find nought. And when I remove the {2} I realize I'm not even constructing it right to find occurrences of one asterisk. I tried escaping the character /* and [/*] but to no avail.
How can i match any occurrence of blah blah * blah blah * blah blah ?
[*]{2} means the two asterisks must be consecutive.
(.*[*]){2} is what you're looking for - it contains two asterisks, with anything in between them.
But we also need to make sure the regex is only testing one tag closure at the same time, so instead of .*, we need to use ((?!<\/array>).)* to make sure it won't consume the end tag </array> while matching .*
The regex can be written as:
(?s)(?<=<array>)(?:((?!<\/array>).)*?[*]){2}(?1)*
See the test result here