Regex match but do not capture with a ".*"

February 9, 2022

I have two blocks of code.

<TabItem Header="{materialDesign:PackIcon Kind=Bank, Size=24}"
                     Style="{StaticResource MaterialDesignNavigationRailTabItem}"
                     ToolTip="Example">

and

<Button Header="{materialDesign:PackIcon Kind=Bank, Size=24}"
                     Style="{StaticResource MaterialDesignNavigationRailTabItem}"
                     ToolTip="Example">

I to select the ToolTip="Example" part and replace it. However, I only want to select the ToolTip that is inside the TabItem block. I can select it with:

ToolTip\=\"(.*?)\"

That selects the one in the Button block as well. I used this StackOverflow Question to try and solve my issue, but I could not figure out how to make it work with a ".*".

So my criteria is:

Must begin with ‘<TabItem’
Must contain ‘ToolTip=".*"’
Must end with ">"

Is what I am trying to achieve possible? If so, how could I achieve this?

>Solution :

This should work

<TabItem\b[^>]*\bToolTip="([^"]*)"[^>]*>

Using [^>]* ensures that the regexp won’t match across multiple tags, and [^"]* won’t allow that capture group to go outside the quoted tooltip attribute.

You can’t use a lookaround for this, because you’d need a lookbehind to match the part before ToolTip, and lookbehinds have to be fixed length in most regexp engines.

If you’re using this in a regexp replacement, put the parts that should be kept in the replacement into capture groups, and then use back-references in the replacement string.