xml - Regex: keep everything in <profession></profession> tags

Question

I have a large XML, looking like this:

<gender>M</gender>
<last-name>*</last-name>
<profession>2165dda2-dc59-41af-acb5-06d8914c4841</profession>
<first-name>*</first-name>
<mail-confirmation>1</mail-confirmation>
<fax-confirmation>1</fax-confirmation>

I only want to keep the tags. I found a way to search IN the tag, like this:

<profession[^>]*>([^<]*?)</profession>

but how do I search everything outside of it? I tried to just flip it, like:

</profession[^>]*>([^<]*?)<profession>

or

</profession>([^<]*?)<profession[^>]*>

but that won't work.

Answer 1

Strictly you can't parse XML with a regex.

Quick and dirty solution with sed is to grep the lines with profession then replace "profession" and "/profession" with "" (markup is stripping the < > )