Regular expression, find text between two strings, excluding the two strings

[ZenMan]

I've been trying to create a regexp to find text between, but not including, two strings. Finding the text between PLUSS the two strings was easy. But finding a way to not get the the two strings also wasn't as easy...

What i'm doing now is just getting the entire text and doing a replace afterwards, but this seems a bit silly really.

What i want to is to find whatever text (text, numbers, everything really) that is between 'display>' and '</a>' and somehow exclude 'display>' and '</a>' from the result.

An example:
<table class=..... display>the text i want</a> ......</table>

What i'm doing now:

String content = "<table class=....display>the text i want</a>....</table>";
StringBuffer text = new StringBuffer();
pattern = Pattern.compile("display>.*?<");
m = pattern.matcher(content);
while (m.find()) {
  textappend( m.group().replace("display>", "").replace("<", "").trim() + "\r\n" );
}

This will return the text AND the two strings, like this:
display>the text i want</a>

and not like I would really want it, like this:
the text i want

And then I have to, as I said, do a replace on the string afterwards to remove the 'display>' and '</a>' parts.

SO! The question is, how can I exclude them from the result using regexp?

[DeadEyes]

use lookbehind and lookahead you'll find some info here http://www.regular-expressions.info/