ansaurus

Question

Regular expression to replace quotation marks in HTML tags only

Answer 1

+3 A:

This could be done in the following way: I think you want to replace every instance of ", that is between a < and a > with '.

So, you look for each " in your file, look behind for a <, and ahead for a >. The Regex looks like

(?<=\<[^<>]*)"(?=[^><]*\>)

You can the replace the found characters to your liking, maybe using Regex.Replace.

Note: While I found the stackoverflow community most friendly and helpful, these Regex/HTML questions are responded with a little too much anger, in my opinion. After all, this question here does not ask "What regex matches all valid html, and does not match anything else.".

Jens 2010-03-15 14:59:26

Thanks. I'll give this a shot.

Cindyydnic 2010-03-15 15:00:41

What if you have a `>` inside a quoted string in a tag? Before you start trying to modify the regex to anticipate every possibility, seems like you might want to have a look at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags

Jefromi 2010-03-15 15:02:02

I made a small mistake. Editing to get the working version. =)

Jens 2010-03-15 15:04:47

While there is certainly a lot of unnecessary anger, the points made in the multitude of regex/html questions are generally valid. Sure, if the question said "I need to do this once on some html which doesn't have anything crazy in it I promise", then regex would be a reasonable approach. If it's a lot of HTML, you're not sure everything is straightforward, you might apply this to new input... you want it to work. You want to parse the HTML.

Jefromi 2010-03-15 15:05:34

@Jefromi: In this case, this Regex breaks, but maybe this is not a problem for the OP. And I understand that people dislike to point to the Agility Pack over and over again. I just think they do so too quickly sometimes. I'd frown at using a third party parser for a small quick and dirty replace. =)

Jens 2010-03-15 15:06:10

I won't have this situation. As I wrote in my comment at the top, the HTML is going to be "sanitized" before I apply the regex. This is running in a company intranet and we have a lot of control over what the string will look like. I understand the dangers of using regular expressions to parse HTML but, in this case, I'm confident that there is no need to worry about the edge cases.

Cindyydnic 2010-03-15 15:07:05

@Jefromi, @Jens Ameskamp: Exactly. In this situation, the regex should work for all of my cases but not necessarily ALL cases for everyone else.

Cindyydnic 2010-03-15 15:08:08

@Jens: My philosophy is that a solution which may work depending on the specifics of what the OP is doing (but hasn't told you) is not in the general case a good solution, though in this case it sounds like it will work out. @Cindyydnic: I know you haven't posted much, and you probably had no idea about the regex/HTML minefield here - the information in that comment is pretty essential to avoiding it (maybe even edit the question to put it in).

Jefromi 2010-03-15 15:09:48

@Jefromi: I know more that enough about the regex minefield. I appreciate how that community is trying to discourage a newbie playing with regex fire but it feels more like smashing a dog on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.However, you are absolutely correct that the question should be updated with an explanation that I am very much aware of the dangers of what I'm asking for.

Cindyydnic 2010-03-15 15:14:17

Answer 2

A:

You can match:

(<div.*?id=)"(.*?)"(.*?>)

and replace this with:

$1'$2'$3

codaddict 2010-03-15 15:03:16

ansaurus

tags:

views:

answers:

Regular expression to replace quotation marks in HTML tags only

related questions