Regex replace is the whole chain! How to make a regular expression jagged?

Question

I work with a really big spreedsheet in Open Office, and I had to study regular expressions to clear it.

I'm currently trying to remove all the <span> tags, and I came up with an expression for this:

 (<span.*?>|</span>) 

The problem is that OpenOffice doesn't seem like a question mark (which should make it jagged), so when I try to remove the <span> tags, it removes most of my line.

Here is sample data: http://pastebin.com/AKWZJJCv

What is an alternative way to use <span> tags that will work in OpenOffice to find and replace?

Answer 1

You can also try (<span[^>]*>|</span>)

Answer 2

Try:

 <(\/)?span([a-zA-z\-\="0-9 ]*)?> 

Tested here .