How can I use regular expression to match this rule

Question

I have a String ,value is "<a>1</a><a>2</a><a>3</a>",and want to match other String like "<a>1</a><a>8</a>",if the one of the first string(like "<a>1</a>") will occur in the second string,then will return true.but I don't know how to write the regular expresstion.
Thx

Answer 1

Fine fine. :P
I was a little bored, so here's some code that uses Strings and a StringBuffer (though you could use a String in place of the StringBuffer). Is this perhaps better? :)
          String testMain = "<a>1</a><ab>2</ab><ab>3</ab>";
          String test = "<ab>1</ab><ab>3</ab>";
          String open = "<ab>";
          String close = "</ab>";
          StringBuffer search = new StringBuffer();
          String checkString = null;
          int lastCheck = 0;
          int start = 0;
          int finish = 0;
          boolean done = false;
          while (!done) {
               start = test.indexOf(open);
               finish = test.indexOf(close);
               if ((start == -1) || (finish == -1)) {
                    System.out.println("No more tags to search for.");
                    done = true;
               else {
                    checkString = test.substring((start + open.length()), finish);
                    search = new StringBuffer();
                    search.append(open);
                    search.append(checkString);
                    search.append(close);
                    if (testMain.indexOf(search.toString()) != -1) {
                         System.out.println("Found value: " + checkString);
                    test = test.substring(finish + close.length());
Resulting output:
Found value: 3
No more tags to search for.
-G