Regular Expression help for parsing html tables

[steve551979 at hotmail.com]

Hello,

I am having some difficulty creating a regular expression for the
following string situation in html. I want to find a table that has
specific text in it and then extract the html just for that immediate
table.

the string would look something like this:

...stuff here...
<table>
...stuff here...
<table>
...stuff here...
<table>
...
text i'm searching for
...
</table>
...stuff here...
</table>
...stuff here...
</table>
...stuff here...


My question:  is there a way in RE to say:   "when I find this text I'm
looking for, search backwards and find the immediate instance of the
string "<table>"  and then search forwards and find the immediate
instance of the string "</table>".  " ?

any help is appreciated.

Steve.