Regex match all whitespace before character

[ceestand]

I'm trying to remove all whitepace in an HTML-formatted string, except within the actual content.

so I want to get:

<p>   <b>some text</b> </p>

to look like

<p><b>some text</b></p>

I've been trying something like:

Regex r = new Regex(@"/s<);
r.Replace(str, "<");
 

with the idea being to replace all the whitespace immediately preceeding the "<" character. That would be fine for what I'm doing, but no expression using *,+,.,?, etc, is working. The best I'm able to get is removing the first whitespace before an "<" character, but sometimes there's more than one.

Please help, the only Regex expressions I'm coming up with right now are "@$*%!!!"

[Shashi Sadasivan]

@(>){ }*(<b)$ or
@(/b>){ }*(<)$

Should be somewhat like that.

the first one @(>){ }*(<b)$ checks that part of the string that starts with >
and ends with <b with spaces in between.

the second part @(/b>){ }*(<)$ finds the string that starts with /b> and ends with <

My regex is pretty shady at the moment...so @ represents the string that has to match starts with the charecters specified after that and $ repreents the chrachter which should contain at the end of the string being searched / matched for.

Hope this helps.