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  • Are you using grep? Can you provide a snippet of your sample file? Commented Dec 6, 2015 at 16:18
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    Your requirements conflict. Type one alphabetic matches "is normal text" in type 3 Commented Dec 6, 2015 at 16:41
  • What do you want from the line <br>s001<br>s002<br> ? When you want to use grep or sed, you should convert your file first into lines with two <br>'s. When everything is given as one long line, you get one match. Commented Dec 6, 2015 at 16:49
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    Why are people voting to close this?  Has the problem “gone away”?  Has somebody identified a trivial typo in the OP’s usage?  … …  @JeffSchaller: What are you talking about?  While “normal text” is terribly vague and open-ended, the closest I can come to making ^letter-digit-digit-digit look like “normal text” is “A100-year-old-man walked into a bar …”, and that’s obviously contrived (it works only because I left out the space that belongs between the “A” and the “100”).  OK, or “T101 is an early version of the Terminator series.” Commented Dec 6, 2015 at 23:24
  • @Danny: (1) How are you doing this search?  grep? vi? sed?  With what options?  (2) Does the line that was matched by any chance have a question mark immediately before the second <br>? Commented Dec 6, 2015 at 23:25