Regex: Remove empty-element tags for xml

Question

I'd like to replace all self-closed elements to the long syntax (because my web-browser is tripping on them).

Example

<iframe src="http://example.com/thing"/&gt;

becomes

<iframe src="http://example.com/thing"&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;

I'm using python's flavor of regex.

Answer 1

In Perl,

s:(<(\w+)[^>]*?)/>:$1></$2>:

will do it.

Answer 2

Use this python regex:

(<(\w+)[^<]*?)/>

It differs from @Kinopiko's in that it will handle nested elements.

Explanation of Regex

1. Find the opening bracket: <
2. Find the word following: (\w+)
3. Find any and all tags between the tag name and its closing bracket except for another open bracket to handle nested tags: [^<]*?
4. Find the closing tag: >

Then just replace with this statement:

\1></\2>

Answer 3

None of those solutions will accommodate attributes like foo="/>". Try:

s:<([\w\-_]+)((?:[^'">]|'[^']*'|"[^"]*")*)/\s*>:<$1$2></$1>:

Exploded to show detail:

<
    ([\w\-_]+)    # tag name
    (
        [^'">]*| # "normal" characters, or
        '[^']*'| # single-quoted string, or
        "[^"]*"  # double-quotes string
    )*
    /\s*         # self-closing
>

This should always work provided that the markup is valid. (You could rearrange this using lazy quantifiers if you so chose; e.g. '[^']' => '.*?'.)