RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags

Posted by Jeff on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Jeff
Published on 2009-11-13T22:38:26Z Indexed on 2010/04/05 1:43 UTC
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regex

|

html

I need to match all of these opening tags:

<p>
<a href="foo">

But not these:

<br />
<hr class="foo" />

I came up with this and wanted to make sure I've got it right. I am only capturing the a-z.

<([a-z]+) *[^/]*?>

I believe it says:

Find a less-than, then
Find (and capture) a-z one or more times, then
Find zero or more spaces, then
Find any character zero or more times, greedy, except /, then
Find a greater-than

Do I have that right? And more importantly, what do you think? =)

EDIT:

Hmm, which answer to mark as correct? For the record, ALL the answers are appreciated. Many thanks!

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