regex between boundary tags

[Charles Knell]

I have a text file captured from a PL/SQL query. It contains 482 XML documents with identical structures. I'd like to merge these into a single document. The root element tag of each document is "<ROWSET>". I'm looking for a regular expression that will match "<ROWSET>[any number of characters here]</ROWSET>". The expression should match each of the 482 documents and not grab all the text between the opening <ROWSET> of the first document and closing </ROWSET> of the 482nd document.

Reading and muddling has not so far produced the results I want, so I'm asking for your help.

Thanks.

[Alan Moore]

The simple answer is:

"(?s)<ROWSET>(.*?)</ROWSET>"

If the documents are very large, you might find that regex to be too slow. Here's a faster version:

"<ROWSET>((?:[^<]++|<(?!/ROWSET>))*+)</ROWSET>"