Regex for HTML Tags — Pattern Explained with Examples

In this tutorial, you'll learn about Regex for HTML Tags. We cover key concepts, practical examples, and best practices to help you understand and apply this topic effectively.

HTML tag matching is heavily used in web scraping, content sanitization, and template processing. While regex is not a full HTML parser, it can effectively match simple opening, closing, and self-closing tags with basic attributes. This pattern is useful for quick extraction and cleanup tasks.

The Pattern

/<[^>]*>/g

For a more detailed pattern including tag names and attributes:

/<\/?[\w\s="'.%-]+>/

Pattern Breakdown

Matches

• <div>
• <img src="img.png" />
• </p>
• <a href="link" class="btn">
• <br>

Does NOT Match

• <div (missing closing bracket)
• <p>unclosed (tag not a complete match — the regex would match <p> but not the full text)
• < div> (spaces between < and tag name)
• div> (missing opening bracket)
• Nested tags properly (regex cannot track nesting depth)

Language Examples

JavaScript

const htmlTagRegex = /<[^>]*>/g;
const html = '<div><p>Hello</p></div>';
console.log(html.match(htmlTagRegex));
// ['<div>', '<p>', '</p>', '</div>']

Python

import re
pattern = r'<[^>]*>'
html = '<div><p>Hello</p></div>'
matches = re.findall(pattern, html)
print(matches)  # ['<div>', '<p>', '</p>', '</div>']

PHP

$html = '<div><p>Hello</p></div>';
preg_match_all('/<[^>]*>/', $html, $matches);
print_r($matches[0]);
// Array ( [0] => <div> [1] => <p> [2] => </p> [3] => </div> )

Common Pitfalls

• Regex cannot parse arbitrary HTML — it fails on nested tags of the same type, malformed markup, and complex attribute values containing > characters
• Script and style tags contain content with < and > that will be incorrectly matched by simple patterns
• HTML comments (<!-- -->) have special syntax that requires its own handling to avoid false positives
• Attribute values can contain > if quoted, but [^>]* would stop at the first > inside the attribute

Real-World Use Cases

• Web scraping — extract all HTML elements from a page for data Parsing and content extraction
• Content sanitization — strip HTML tags from user input to prevent XSS Attacks in rendered output
• Template processing — identify and replace custom template tags or directives within HTML markup

FAQ

Related Patterns

Regex for URL Regex for Email