html - Regular expression for nested tags (innermost to make it easier)

Question

I researched this quite a bit, but couldn't find a working example how to match nested html tags with attributes. I know it is possible to match balanced/nested innermost tags without attributes (for example a regex for and would be #<div[^>]*>(?:(?> [^<]+ ) |<(?!div[^>]*>))*?</div>#x).

However, I would like to see a regex pattern that finds an html tag pair with attributes.

Example: It basically should match

<div class="aaa"> **<div class="aaa">** <div> <div> </div> **</div>** </div>

and not

<div class="aaa"> **<div class="aaa">** <div> <div> **</div>** </div> </div>

Anybody has some ideas?

For testing purposes we could use: http://www.lumadis.be/regex/test_regex.php

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PS. Steven mentioned a solution in his blog (actually in a comment), but it doesn't work

http://blog.stevenlevithan.com/archives/match-innermost-html-element

$regex = '/<div[^>]+?ids*=s*"MyID"[^>]*>(?:((?:[^<]++|<(?!/?div[^>]*>))+)|(<div[^>]*>(?>(?1)|(?2))*</div>))?</div>/i';

Answer 1

RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags

And indeed, it is absolutely impossible. HTML has something unique, something magical, which is immune to RegEx.