Regular expression to find instances of strings within XML nodes

Question

I need to find all instances of strings within an xml node. To be more specific, I'd like to parse some XAML and place all strings within certain controls (label for one) and set them as attributes instead. So, instead of this

<Label>My string</Label>

I want this:

<Label Content="My string"></Label>

The regular expression I have come up with is ">\s*[^<]". I read this as matching strings that have a greater than sign, followed by any amount of whitespace, followed by any character other than the less than sign. However, I'm not getting what I expect. For instance, here is one of the matches:

>\\r\\n\\t\\r\\n    <UserControl..."

Any ideas?

Answer 1

it has been said here a thousand times: don't try to "parse" XML with regular expressions. the proper tools to use here is an xml processor.

with such, it is quite easy - and, more importantly, error-free - to select all <Label> elements and the text nodes (My string) inside and, from them, generate new XML nodes (<Label Content="My string"></Label>). the implementation is left as an exercise for the reader :)

Answer 2

You could search for

<(Label|OtherTag|YetAnotherTag)>(\s*[^<]*)</\1>

and replace that with

<\1 Content="\2"></\1>

or even

<\1 Content="\2"/>

IF you're absolutely sure that there won't be any nested tags among those that you're looking at, and there really is no other way but regex.