sed html tags

[siran]

Hi, I have the string

<span xxxx> 111 </span> 2222 <span yyyy> 3333 </span>

And i wish to use sed to strip *only* the "<span xxxx>" tag and its
contents... is this possible ? I'm trying this expression, but it
doesn't work...

sed 's/<span xxxx[^\(</span>\)]+<\/span>//g' file

is there anything like it ?

I would like to obtain

2222



I hope someone can help,

thank you,

siran