RegEx to remove XML tags and their content

Question

I would like to remove <bpt *>*</bpt> and <ept *>*</ept>  from the following string without using an XML parser.

The big <bpt i="1" x="1" type="bold"><b></bpt>black<ept i="1"></b></ept> <bpt i="2" x="2" type="ulined"><u></bpt>cat<ept i="2"></u></ept> sleeps.

Any regex in VB.NET or C# will do.

Answer 1

I presume you want to drop the tag entirely.

(<bpt .*?>.*?</bpt>)|(<ept .*?>.*?</ept>)

If that is so, then the ? after the * makes it non-greedy, so it will try to match as few characters as possible.