regex - Extract text and links from HTML using Regular Expressions

Question

I would like to extract text from an html document keeping the links inside it. for example:

From this HTML code

<div class="CssClass21">bla1 bla1 bla1 <a href="http://www.ibrii.com">go to ibrii</a> bla2 bla2 bla2 <img src="http://www.contoso.com/hello.jpg"> <span class="cssClass34">hello hello</span>

I would like to extract just this

bla1 bla1 bla1 <a href="http://www.ibrii.com">go to ibrii</a> bla2 bla2 bla2 hello hello

In another post on StackOverflow i have found the RegEx <[^>]*> which allows to extract text by replacing every match with nothing. How can I exclude the anchor tags from the match? It seems that RegEx do not allow inverse matching.

Answer 1

Regular expressions do allow a non-trivial form of negation through lookahead but in this case it would be just good as an excercise because, while I'n no zealot that burns with holy fire every time regexp get mentioned together with HTML, this is really a problem to be solved with a parser.