Some problem with regex

Question

hello all in my site users can insert data using tabular format. that table can be of any style. but im using regex to give those tables a standard format of our site.but when im using regex it works well but it is removing colspan. but i need colspan widout it tables looks very odd. will anyone please tell me wats wrong with my regex?? following is my regex codes:

$table=eregi_replace("<table[^>]*>","<table  width='100%' border='0' cellspacing='0' cellpadding='0' class='tabularData'>", $table);
$table= preg_replace('/style\s*=\s*(\'|").+(\'|")/i', '', $table);
$table= preg_replace('/bgcolor\s*=\s*(\'|").+(\'|")/i', '', $table);
$table=eregi_replace("<span[^>]*>","",$table);

thanks in advance :)

Answer 1

You can easily style the tables with Javascript. In fact you should. Having a regex run like that over users code can lead to security problems if the user figures out your regex (and if you fail to implement it properly; which will probably be the case).

// jquery table styling example (picks up all tables)
$('table').css({
    'width': '100%',
    'background-color': '#F00'
});

Hope it helps!

Answer 2

Don't use regular expressions where is no need do to that. Use DOM to parse this.